


Isaac Newton's Girl

by PennyJackson250



Category: The Maze Runner Series - All Media Types
Genre: Canon Rewrite, Depression, F/M, Heartache, Implied/Referenced Suicide, Major Character Undeath, Sad, Sad with a Happy Ending, lots of death, reader has an established name, will make you cry
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-15
Updated: 2021-03-07
Packaged: 2021-03-08 22:14:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 37
Words: 264,044
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27024112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PennyJackson250/pseuds/PennyJackson250
Summary: "You don't scare me, Newton." He smiled, "Oh, you scare me, Lil. You bloody scare me."This is the story of the children of the Maze - from WICKED's choice to a Cure and their 'Ever After' - told by a fiery Group B girl inexplicably linked to an infected Glader. Can the teens stay alive and pull back their lost memories before he loses his mind? What if the Immunes never gave up?
Relationships: Brenda/Thomas (Maze Runner), Minho (Maze Runner)/Original Female Character(s), Newt (Maze Runner)/Reader
Comments: 15
Kudos: 39





	1. Prologue - 2071

**Prologue - 2071**

The phone call came at 2AM, December 15th, 2071. It was snowing. I remember.

"We've got him."

The words we'd been waiting for. The words that had echoed through Minho's mind as he'd scoured the wreckage of the W.I.C.K.E.D buildings. Through Thomas' as he tested drugs in the Andes until he fell asleep over the table. Through mine as I held patient after patient through bandage after bandage, scream after scream. "We got him. East Denver. But it ain't good."

A hospital is a strange place at night - the linoleum floors and the LED bulbs never change and the windowless corridors should suspend you in time, stop you from knowing, but they don't. The people move more slowly, the patients almost invisible and the only noise ricocheting off the white-panelled walls is the whirring of the machines behind closed doors. Like the bolted one we were all staring at - the one that reminded us a little too much of the Phase Three cells at W.I.C.K.E.D.

It seemed that even now, when the organisation had ceased to exist, the aftershocks of W.I.C.K.E.D's torture still had us trapped. Minho was pacing up and down like a military commander, his face set and muscles tight, twisting the doctor's message around and around in his hands like the words scrawled across it would change if he just kept moving.

"What do they mean, 'pending conscious reaction'?" He spat, not pausing in his strides as he glared at the nurse that skittered through the door behind him. "What other freaking 'reaction' can he have?"

No one answered. No one wanted to think about that. Thomas wasn't even listening. Sprawled on the linoleum, his mind was far away, in the backstreets of Denver eight months ago. A gun. A frightened boy with wild eyes. Please, Tommy, please.

"He's a fighter, damn it! Give him a cell of a chance and he'll fight like hell!"

"They don't know him." Gally broke in finally from the chair he'd slumped into. "They can't know that."

"Then why in hell is it their decision?!" Minho suddenly snapped out of his pacing, slamming his fist against the wall with such force that the boom echoed down the corridor like the rumble of cannons, a chunk of plaster crumbling onto the floor.

"Shuck it!" Min's voice was full of the desperation of the last eight months, layered over the fury of the past five years. When he spoke again, his voice was thick and quiet and not quite steady.

"What will we do, after all this? What will we do if they won't even try?"

The faint beeping of the Analysis machine filtered around the edges of the bolted door, filling our silence as its intensity increased. I ran my fingers across the misshapen lizard pendant at my neck, carved by a fifteen year old with indefinite hope in a training facility years ago. A.D Janson had told us our effort was futile, that we'd never be free. And maybe he was right - we might never escape W.I.C.K.E.D, not completely. But in this case W.I.C.K.E.D would always be wrong - this time we had hope. I stood and rested a hand on Minho's shoulder, turning him to face me.

"We'll do what we always do – what he told us to do. We'll fight. Together."

**Chapter 1 – Memories, Madness and Black-Suited Men**

**Five Years Earlier**

**May 28th 2066**

It was my mother's voice that pierced my safe duvet-cocoon world, ringing through the old house and summoning me into a reluctant 8 AM reality.

"Honey! There's… there's someone here to talk to you!"

When I woke up that morning, with the sun streaming in through the slats in my forever-bolted windows, I'd expected it to be like every other day that had crawled past since the Sun Flares hit: studying, reading, lunch, studying, piano, dinner, reading, bed – the repetitive jigsaw pieces that made up the monotony and isolation of my continual house arrest.

I was the only child of Jeremy and Lucille Serallier, a mechanical engineer and an English teacher, and ever since the Flare virus had reached America, my father disappearing soon after, my mother had yet to let me out of her sight. If I was lucky, my cousin Ruby might come round for ten minutes before Mom shooed her out and sterilized everything she'd touched - when my Uncle Dan started losing his mind, she'd become obsessive about me and hygiene. That had always seemed like shutting the door after the horse had bolted, but I couldn't blame her. She was afraid. We all were. But, when I woke up that morning, I had no idea that this one day and the people waiting in it – good, bad and ugly – would turn my small town life irretrievably upside down, tearing it into confetti pieces to build the one I live now.

Opening my eyes blearily, I dragged myself from my cocoon and into the window seat that my Dad had built when I was six. It was my favourite escape place – shaped like a crescent moon - and I had sat in it for so long over the years that the pink velvet of the seat was tattered and shiny in the centre. I stood up on the seat, hooking my fingers into the grooves I'd worn in the window-frame and looked out across the town – not that you could really call it that anymore. The Flare had forced almost everyone in this part of town into their homes and those who did go out wore masks across their faces and took huge detours to avoid passing within three metres of another human being, practically running to the next building to avoid interaction.

Like that can stop anything, I thought. It's an inevitable.

I'd decided that human beings in general react badly to inevitables. They see them, know in the backs of their heads what they are, but instead of enjoying the time they have before inevitability descends, they run around desperately trying to stop it and end up wasting their lives in constant fear of the only possibility left. And the people here were no different. Of course, there are always that gang of boys who play at being 'rebels', kicking a football around the concrete and yelling at the people in the houses. I could see them from my windowsill, aiming shots at each other's heads and lighting up cigarettes they'd bartered off some other idiot who wanted to blacken his lungs. One of them spotted my face at the window and made some comment that I couldn't hear to his friends. The loudest one, Josh Forster-Jones, shouted up to the window:

"You ogling us again, Birdie?! Come on down – we've got Marlboro Lights!"

I winced at the use of my father's nickname, feeling something twist painfully in my stomach, and dragged my fingers through my hair to flatten it before levering open the huge glass pane and leaning out.

"In your dreams FJ! I hope you choke on them!" I managed a mocking grin – Josh's mom was my mother's second cousin. We practically grew up in the same stroller – I wasn't afraid of him. But before he could reply, I heard a panicked gasp from inside, and my Mom's voice echoed up the stairs, fear lacing her words:

"Darling, close that window now! This minute - you know it's airborne – come down!"

I pulled it shut with a sigh. We're three floors up!

"It's closed, Mom – give me a second!

I grabbed my jeans, a vest top and my high-tops, pulled them on and grabbed a hairbrush off the dresser, glancing at myself in the mirror. My chestnut-coloured hair was sticking up on both sides of my head, like it usually did (which had always made my Dad laugh as he ruffled my hair and called me 'Grasshopper') but it didn't sound like I had time to put it in a ponytail, forget wash it, so I dragged a brush through it optimistically, cleaned my teeth and then ran down the three creaky flights to the kitchen before skidding to an abrupt halt at what greeted me.

Mom was there, leaning on the back of my father's chair, a strained smile on her worn face, but standing next to her was a tall man wearing a black suit and an equally black expression. He held a briefcase in one hand with the letters W.I.C.K.E.D stamped across it in red letters edged in gold. I remember wondering vaguely if this was some kind of twisted sing-a-gram – it was only a fortnight after my birthday – surely no businessman who wanted to be taken seriously would name their company 'WICKED' and stamp it across a briefcase in scarlet lettering? He looks more like a caricature than a person, I thought. But then the caricature caught me staring and gave me a tight-lipped smile that didn't reach his eyes- that didn't really fit my theory - before nodding to Mom, who suddenly jerked into action.

"Honey, this is Mr Black from the World In Catastrophe: Killzone Experiment Department."

She smiled too, attempting reassurance, but the look on her face was like nothing I'd ever seen before. Her lips were curved upwards, but they were trembling, almost like she was about to cry, and despite her attempted smile, my brain couldn't get past 'Killzone Department.' A cold feeling settled in my stomach. This was no sing-a-gram.

"He's here to talk to us about you." Briefcase nodded and gestured towards our patchwork armchairs chairs in the corner of the room. He looked so remarkably out of place among the scatter cushions in his perfectly tailored suit and polished shoes that I would have laughed if I hadn't been so unsettled.

"Sit down please. I need you to take this very seriously." By this point, the name of this organisation, my mother's face and the fact that Black was the first visitor we'd had for three years had ensured that I wasn't about to do anything else, but I was somewhat relieved to see him do something other than nod. I obeyed silently, pulling a cushion onto my lap and watching the man opposite me. Why is he looking at me like my life depends on it? He met my eyes and spread his hands wide.

"Look, I'm not going to beat around the bush here – there isn't an easy way to say this. You know about the Flare I assume. I hope so or perhaps you are not as intelligent as I was led to believe." I nodded sharply. Who doesn't know about the virus that's destroying the world as we know it? I hadn't seen it though. Not properly. Mom had kept me about as far away from Uncle Dan as was humanly possible – and he was on the Bliss anyway. But the laughter I'd heard still haunted my dreams.

"The fact is, it's stealing the identities of thousands every single day. Every attempt at quarantine or containment is failing. No matter what we build it always gets past it. The only treatment available is the Bliss, which is exceedingly costly to produce and does nothing to cure the disease."

"I know." I told him. Everybody knew. But other than to remind me that I'll eventually die in the worst imaginable way, why was he telling me?

"Good. But here's the thing, kid. We need a cure or the whole human race will die. But, as the situation stands, we have nothing to base it on. Cranks themselves are too volatile – the Flare Effect varies too much for any result to be useful. However, we have realised that a small group of people, mainly under the age of twenty, have a certain quality that could benefit our research and help us find a cure. People like this – people like you - seem to find it much harder to contract the Flare. Typically, it seems to affect individuals with a high intelligence level – though not always."

What? There was a way to prevent the Flare? Then why was this 'W.I.C.K.E.D' hiding it? My thoughts flickered to Uncle Dan, my mother, the girl that Ruby would eventually be.

"But – but why not tell everyone? People are dying!" My voice was rising. "How can you not tell them?" Mom raised her hand to quiet me but Mr Black just looked immeasurably sad.

"If only we could. But we can't work out what makes you kids the way you are. That's why we need your help. You will be placed into training for a number of – harmless – tests to try and study your mental patterns. With W.I.C.K.E.D, I assure you, you are safe. However, there are those on the outside that hate your kind – there are very few places of security for people like you, and we're offering you one. You can't take this lightly, kid. Therefore you must leave your home behind, assume a new identity and come with us."

I stared at him wordlessly, trying to take it in. Clearly, the Flare had already got to him. How could they expect me to leave my mother alone in this creaking old house, and follow him into some crackpot experiment like a rabbit in a shampoo lab? And then have the nerve to tell me it's for my own good? I calmly placed the cushion back onto the arm of the chair and met his gunmetal eyes.

"Thank you Mr Black, but I can't do that. My mother needs me here - she hasn't got anyone else. My father disappeared four years ago. I'm sorry for wasting your time."

I looked across to my mother, about to return her reassuring smile – I won't leave you – when she suddenly cast her eyes to the floor, avoiding my gaze. A slow smirk spread across Mr Black's face as he carried on.

"It's a non-negotiable situation, kid. Your mother signed you over an hour ago. You belong to the organization now. Your suitcase is by the door, packed."

This was a joke, or a hallucination, it had to be – I was asleep, I'd caught the Flare already, I was raving in an attic somewhere about sing-a-grams and men with ominous briefcases. This couldn't be real. However dark and twisted reality had become in the last decade, it wasn't this. I felt like I'd been punched in the stomach, the bruising already festering out to the rest of my body. The edges of my vision clouded and the room seemed to rock slightly, a sense of impossible betrayal filling my mind. 'Signed me over'. An object to be bought and sold.

My mother's eyes were still angled downwards, fixed on a blackened floorboard where one of my father's ill-fated robots had caught fire six years ago and, before I could plead with her, the man was holding out my duffel coat and was speaking again, pushing a small piece of white plastic about the size of a credit card across the table towards me. His voice reached me like an echo underwater.

"This is your identification. Under no circumstances let yourself be caught without it."

I picked it up off the table before looking at it in confusion:

**NAME: Lilianne Pasteur**

**D.O.B: 03/11/000**

**GENDER: Female**

**SUBJECT: B5**

**PROPERTY OF WICKED**

My gender was the only thing on that card that belonged to me.

"Lilianne Pasteur?" I asked. "But… that isn't my name." Mr Black sighed deeply and rolled his eyes, an unsettlingly juvenile gesture from someone so serious.

"They assured me you were intelligent. You must leave your identity behind or you will find yourself a target for Cranks and their allies. The faster you accept your identity the easier it will be. And we must leave now, Miss Pasteur."

Now, I have never been an especially dramatic individual – I'm the worrier, the peacemaker, the person on the edge of a fight screaming 'STOP, STOP' and bandaging the loser at the end. But in that second the last half hour, the tears that were silently coursing down my mother's face, Black's patronising pity and this false identity built up into a tsunami and crashed over my head and something within me snapped. I spun on my heel, dodging past Mom before she could react and bolting for the stairs, pulling the briefcase and the identification card off the nearby table in my wake and yelling over my shoulder:

"I am nobody's property!"

My eyes burned as I sprinted up the stairs, tears spilling over onto my cheeks. I'd spent the last three years of my life wishing and wishing I could be free from this place, that someone would take me away from here, and some distant part of my brain wondered why I was crying. I'd wanted adventure, I'd wanted a life – but not like this.

My head spinning with anger, fear and confusion, I flung myself into the window seat, climbing up to the highest section of it and perching there, determined to show the emptiness of the room that, however uncomfortable it was, I could sit there. I could control something. In those first few seconds, I gave in and cried, crying that sort of crying that doesn't make a whole lot of sense – the way you do without knowing what else to do - that crying that's fiercer than any tears with actual reason. But then something fluttered on the edge of my vision and I looked up. A piece of paper was caught in the corner of my window and when I pulled myself to it to look more closely, I saw that it was a prescription. A Bliss prescription to be precise, the thousand dollar figure still visible on the label. Against my will, fragment's of Mr Black's words slid into my whirling mind:

"Help us…people like you… thousands of lives… find a cure."

I looked back to the prescription. It was a local one. Whose is that? I wondered, Who else was trying to dodge death? I probably knew them. My area wasn't all that big – probably someone who'd come to all the school events, been to all the dances and balls, the charity actions, who'd put in five dollars to buy me a present when my Dad disappeared – someone who'd have their life stolen away. Could I stop that? Not alone. This wasn't a job for one person playing at being a hero. But how could I ever look out of my window again without seeing that slip of paper? How could I turn on the T.V without hearing the laughter or close my eyes without seeing their scarred faces – knowing that I had a chance to help and I refused? And why? Because I was frightened. But I bet I wasn't half as frightened as the owner of that slip.

Slowly, I opened the window and unhooked the sheet with my fingertips and slipped it into my pocket before clambering down from the seat and walking to my door. I looked back and took in the bright colours and the thousands of memories that filled the room: impromptu dance parties with my Mom when I'd had a bad day, adventure stories and school projects with Dad, building an Eiffel tower out of spaghetti, marshmallows and laughter, battling pirates and besting horrific beasts with Ruby– it almost crippled me. But I'd made my decision. And though I had no idea what my future would be, I knew in my heart that I'd never come back.

When I stepped back into the silent kitchen, taking the offered coat in a daze, I fought to mask the devastation on my face with some fragment of the determination I'd felt upstairs. Trying to keep my face still, I moved towards my Mom, who immediately reached out her arms for me, but Black grabbed my shoulder, pulling me back, his fingernails digging into my skin.

"No goodbyes. It makes it so much harder to leave. Besides, we've been here far too long already. It won't be long until someone gets a grip on our location – and I have a very tight schedule."

I forced back the fury and the tears that were choking me. "What happens then? If you get found?"

"Believe me kid, you've got to hope you never find out." Black pulled open our front door and a gust of air rushed in, immediately sending an age-old flicker of panic across Mom's face as she grabbed the nearest towel and pressed it to her mouth. My eyes flashed to the clock on the wall. 9 AM. It took one hour for the world to fall apart.

"Come on, Lilianne."

No. At the sound of the alien name, I ripped my shoulder out of his grip and ran back, throwing myself into my mother's arms, like the child I had been before the world had started to burn. She smelled of lavender and her favourite perfume, the one that Dad had bought her every Valentine's Day since they were seventeen years old. I remembered that she was on her very last bottle. What would she do next year? Her arms tightened around me, as they had a million times before, for every tear, every success, every heartbreak, every kiss since the day I was born. But this was a place that she couldn't protect me. This was a place I'd have to face on my own. I laced my fingers through her trembling ones, not bothering to hide my tears now.

"Why?" I whispered. For the first time that morning, she looked me in the eyes, her face suddenly intense, like she wanted to write every word of her next sentences into the surface of my brain, like the shopping lists she'd scrawl on my hands, just to make sure I held it there.

"I love you." She drew a deep shuddering breath. "God almighty, and I always will. Just like your father. You remind me to breathe, you remind me to get out of bed every day and do something with this life I have and God, I need you for that. But that's selfish, honey, can't you see that? I love you, but you're not safe here, I can't keep you safe anymore. I would die for you –" She laughed, suddenly, her voice almost hysterical. "And I never thought I'd have to tell you that. But what good would that do? Against this disease, those people, what good would that do? These people can keep you safe – I can't. I can't…"

Her voice broke, and she gripped my hands so tightly it left marks in my skin. I didn't even notice the sting. "Don't you ever think that I'm giving you up. Never, never. Don't you ever forget that. But you go out there, my darling, and you give them hell. Do you hear me?"

I nodded, unable to answer. I don't think I could ever have given her an answer, with any possible combination of words that could have told her how I felt in that second. Black suddenly cleared his throat and sighed, tapping his watch, entirely unmoved.

"Schedule, ladies…" All question of the matter vanished and I knew I hated him. I didn't respond, keeping my eyes fixed on my mother's.

"I'll give them hell. I promise. I love you too. Don't you ever forget that."

My voice trailed off, barely above a whisper as I whirled on my heel, grabbing my suitcase and running out of my door ahead of Black before she could pull me back, before I could change my mind, stepping out of our doorway and shattering everything I'd ever known.


	2. Trains, Ticket Stubs and Exceptional Timing

**Chapter 2 – Trains, Ticket Stubs and Exceptional Timing**

**10:55 AM**

**"This is it."**

Two hours, a surprisingly beaten-up black Volvo and an infuriating number of monosyllabic responses later, Black and I stepped out onto what had once been a bustling train platform. I could still see scraps of ancient posters clinging stubbornly onto billboards and old tickets stubs wedged into cracks in the weakening floorboards, final fragments of a fading world. The wind whistled through the slats in the roof above us, eliciting a deep moan from its wooden beams and sending goosebumps across my skin.

"Hmm. This location is significantly worse for wear, Miss Pasteur, but will serve its purpose. The train arrives in –"

Mr. Black tapped the expensive Rolex strapped to his thin wrist, with a satisfied 'humph'.

"Precisely five minutes."

"The train?"

He gave me a withering look, as if he was wondering why he'd been saddled with the day's evident idiot.

"Yes, the train. The train with the remaining subjects, of course."

Remaining subjects? I batted Mr. Black's scathing tone away, realizing that I hadn't thought about the other people W.I.C.K.E.D had coerced into their experiments. The other people that would share my life from the next five minutes onwards, my mind still clinging onto those that I'd left in that crumbling town, vanishing into the distance. The other people who'd had their futures signed away by frightened families – W.I.C.K.E.D's other lab rats.

Did they know anything? Did they know what they were going to do? Or were they just as scared as I was?

And I don't think I truly understood until years later that the only question that held even a whisper of truth was that last one. Loud, brash, shy, uncertain, strong, confident, weak, cheerful, fast, cocky; every one of the children in that train – because that was what we were, whatever Chancellor Paige tried to pretend – was frightened out of their mind.

My final five minutes of isolation passed in an almost tangible silence with only the occasional chirp of a passing bird or the creak of the overhead lines to break it. I turned the unfamiliar white identification card over in my hands, just to have something to do; contemplating how much pressure I'd have to apply to snap the thing in half.

In the end, Mr. Black's smug prediction was unsettlingly accurate.

At exactly 11 o'clock, a high-pitched screech ripped through my ears and my new future began to creak towards us in the form of a battered metallic-grey monster. The enormous train, with its peeling paint and squealing machinery looked – and sounded - like it'd been thrown together by a drunk mechanic fifty years before the Sun Flares.

We got up from the cool metal chairs on the platform periphery and stepped towards it as the train ground to a juddering halt in front of us. I could already hear the muffled roar of people through the rusted door and felt a flicker of panic rip through my chest. This is it, I thought. New life. Don't mess it up.

As the doors groaned open, Mr Black stretched out his hand strangely, like he was about to touch my shoulder but thought better of it. There was a strange look of concern in his steel-grey eyes that might have touched me if I hadn't so thoroughly disliked him.

"Be careful, Miss Pasteur. You are one of the more – um - privileged subjects. Some of them are not quite as… eloquent as you are."

Reassuring. But then, that seemed to be becoming just about typical. I'd give as good as I got.

I nodded, acknowledging his warning and reached up, grabbing the yellow bar on the inside of the train and swinging myself in, hearing the carriage wail in protest under my feet. Mr. Black might have raised a hand in farewell as I turned my back, seeing movement flash out of the corner of my eye, but I didn't turn - I decided that was better than a choice gesture and showing the cold W.I.C.K.E.D operative just how eloquent I could be.

The door in front of me was large, with a small window and 'Company C' etched onto a wooden plaque. At least, that's what I think it said. It actually read 'C m p ny C' in cracked black varnish. Someone was yelling inside – or maybe several people, I wasn't sure - and someone reasonably young was emitting a high-pitched howling noise that no-one seemed to be doing anything about. It was that wail that gave me the courage, I think. That kid sounded like I felt. I took a deep breath along with the train, wheezing as it rattled forwards and I pushed open the door.

Here goes nothing.


	3. Backstreet Boy

**Chapter 3 – Backstreet Boy**

In the end, my angst wasn't really worth it. A couple of people glanced in my direction, but the majority carried on with whatever randomness they'd busied themselves with. I say randomness – chaos is probably a better word.

An Asian boy, about my age, was hanging upside down from a ceiling rail that was creaking ominously whilst a blonde girl with dip-dyed hair was yelling at him to get off 'before you bring the freaking roof down and kill us all!'. Some others were playing a noisy game of Snap in the corner, screeching at the tops of their voices, a shady-looking figure was scratching nasty graffiti on the windows that would have made Mom's eyes burn. Honestly, for a small carriage, there were people in pretty much every position imaginable – sprawled on the floor, sitting, hanging, standing, sleeping, screaming – you name it, there was somebody doing it.

For a long second, I just stared into the carriage looking at the mayhem but a sudden choked wail startled me out of my trance. My eyes swivelled to one corner of the battered tin can that housed a long, splintering bench with four pierced teenagers lounging on it. One of them glared at a small, shivering bundle on the end of the bench before aiming a plastic bottle at it.

"God, kid – shut the hell up before I come over there and shut your trap myself!"

The plastic bottle found its target and the kid in the blankets squealed, the wailing dying down to a muffled sniffling. A flare of irritation flashed through me as I looked at the grimy older boy – yeah, as far as I could tell, this sucked, but we were all in the same sucky boat – taking it out on a sobbing child was low.

"Leave him alone!" I demanded, "What's he done to you?"

The boy looked up, eyebrows raised, evidently surprised that I'd dared to question him. He leered at me, brushing his greasy hair from his forehead, his eyes sweeping me up and down, and I took a step backwards warily.

"What's he done?! He's driving nails into our skulls and taking up a mile of space too –Why should I, Rich Girl?"

The boy stood up then, towering over me, his day-old breath making my head spin and I suddenly lost all ability to speak.

Because…because..." I stammered, searching my mind for a scathing comeback, "Because it's not very nice, is it?"

Wow Lilianne. Just wow. I should be a politician. The jerk and his cronies immediately started cackling and flipping me off – "Daddy couldn't buy you an IQ, sugar?" I was shrinking down next to the bundle in the corner, wishing I could sink into the floor, when a voice called:

"For God's sake, give it a freaking rest, Sam!" It was the blonde girl who'd been screaming before. She strutted across the carriage in her miniskirt, her spike-heeled boots clacking on the wooden beams as she went. "We all know you have the biggest ego in the room, sweetie – leave it out". She tossed her thick hair across her shoulder as she spoke, raising an eyebrow. Sam smirked up at her now, changing his tune:

"Sure thing, gorgeous…" The girl wrinkled her nose and threw herself down onto the bench next to me.

"You okay?" She grinned, "Sorry about that – He's an idiot." I snorted and nodded weakly.

"Yeah – thanks."

"No problem! I'm Karly, by the way – Karly Linnaeus. That idiot over there's Minho - he's the son of a martial arts medallist from Korea."

Karly pointed across at the Asian boy she'd been yelling at before, who – on hearing his name – heaved himself into a vertical position and waved. Looking at him, I could believe it - the guy was built like an oak tree and in his current situation, I could see the veins popping in his muscled arms. I didn't realise I was staring until Karly elbowed me in the ribs with a questioning face:

"Aaaand you are?"

"Oh! Sorry - Lilianne Pasteur."

Karly screwed her eyes up, "Yeesh. And I thought Linnaeus was bad..."

I drew back then, confused and a little offended. What was wrong with my name? Okay, it definitely wasn't much – it sounded more like one of those fancy liqueur chocolates that looks pretty but nobody actually likes, than a name – but it was all I had. What right did this high-school prom queen have to sneer at it? I was getting ready to make a snarky comment that was about as impressive as my remark to Sam when Karly noticed the look on my face and hastily raised her hands:

"Whoa, whoa – no offense! I thought they'd told you the whole thing with the names!"

There was a pattern to our names? That would make sense – the few I'd heard so far sounded pretty insane. Karly was hurrying to explain it, gesturing at the other carriage hostages, rattling off their names at a million miles an hour – and I was absolutely certain that I would remember none of them afterwards. Her first gesture was at a small, willowy girl with perfect coffee-coloured skin and flowing black hair.

"That's Mariella Curie, she's from Lisbon, got on the train two weeks ago – talks about her hair, her make-up and her boyfriend constantly – disgrace to her namesake, don't waste your time." I nodded, hoping that was the right response. Next was a taller, African looking girl with dark-brown hair and a skinny looking redhead with milk white skin.

"Harriet Beecher-Stowe and Sonya Sarandon: They're okay, quite smart and a hundred times better than Mariella. Dmitri Mendeleev, Russian – seems alright but speaks absolutely no English, so no-one really has a clue about the guy (could be a mass murderer for all we know). Benjamin Franklin…"

Karly carried on with the list but I'd stopped listening, turning the names over in my head. They were all familiar to me – Marie Curie discovered radioactivity, Dmitri Mendeleev was the Periodic table, Harriet Beecher-Stowe wrote Uncle Tom's Cabin, Carl Linnaeus… I think that was something to do with animals and then…

"And then there's you!" Karly paused for breath, "Louis Pasteur – wasn't he that milk guy?"

"Pasteurization." I said, feeling a sudden need to protect my namesake. There was no way I was going to be known as 'the milk girl' for the next decade. She nodded,

"Okay. So we're basically all famous people, which is why it sucks! I mean, come on, I could have been Rihanna or Oprah, or at least someone interesting – Joan of Arc or Cleopatra or something. But no."

Karly threw herself back against the rusted wall of the train, the hollow creaking sound disappearing into the general clamour of the carriage, and throwing her hand across her forehead dramatically. "I get to be the guy who invented the organism classification system."

Looking at this girl, collapsed across a window ledge, my exhausted brain started to summarize every depressing thing I'd been told that day. New identity, brain patterns, harmless tests, killzone department, 'you better hope you never find out', containment failure – and her theatrical display over a celebrity namesake suddenly seemed so ridiculous that I started to laugh – and not the attractive giggling you see on TV either; full on laughter than doesn't have a specific sound but is made up completely of snorting, squeaking and high-pitched noises. Karly removed her hand from her face in surprise and mock irritation, but took one look at me and promptly joined in.

By the time we'd stopped laughing over nothing and had pulled ourselves together, the 50% of the room that wasn't passed out was staring at us like we were full-gone Cranks. (At the time I didn't realise how normal that was going to become) But I'd passed the point of caring now, so just met their eyes and grinned at them Cheshire cat style and sang "Sorry!"

Karly picked my hand up off the seat and swung it back and forth, stating "We're gonna be friends."

And though she was never the kind of friend I'd imagined when I was alone in my room, or even the kind of friend I'd have picked when I stepped into W.I.C.K.E.D's world for the first time, she was right.

In the next hour, as the clouds drew together across the sky and the rain began to batter the carriage - the noise sounding like gunfire inside the metal room- , I learned. I'd be more specific but that's really what it was. Mostly I learned useless trivia about the other people on the train (Minho's greatest weakness is avocado, Karly can quote every Keira Knightley film there has ever been, Mariella's boyfriend is called Archibaldo, Harriet won fifteen under 12 marathons before the sun flares hit and Dmitri loves kittens - we think) but also, we pooled our knowledge about W.I.C.K.E.D and what was happening. Unfortunately, it didn't take much pooling to work out that we knew absolutely nothing, but I think it made everybody feel better to come up with bizarre theories about our possible destination and our future. The reality, of course, was beyond our wildest nightmares, but in that freezing train with a storm starting up outside, it was much more entertaining to spout rubbish like 'world domination', 'cloning' and 'advanced chicken racing' than anything that was actually possible.

So, when the door flew open with an almighty crash and two teenage boys were flung roughly in, it's fair to say that everyone jumped a foot in the air.

"Oh my God!" Karly yelled, pulling on my arm as a man in a white suit walked in behind the boys, a disapproving expression on his face. W.I.C.K.E.D was painted across the jacket in large red letters. The boys were still on the floor, trying to disentangle their limbs when the man started to lecture them in the most patronising voice imaginable.

"Boys, boys, boys." This was accompanied by a disappointed shake of the head. "You are supposed to be intelligent young men –how many times must I tell you? STAY IN YOUR DESIGNATED CARRIAGE UNTIL WE REACH OUR DESTINATION. There are small children and elderly citizens in the other parts of the train and your attire, manner and language greatly unsettles them. There are solitary compartments that could be arranged for the next six hours if you cannot follow the rules…"

The man let the threat tail off. The older boy, a dark-skinned teen with close cropped hair, mumbled something that might have been an apology, hanging his head and placing what was supposed to be a restraining hand on the other boy's arm. The younger one was tall, taller than his friend but far skinner, his legs too long for his body. He shook off the hand irritably and stood up, brushing his dark blond hair out of his eyes. Does he want to spend the rest of the trip solitary? I thought, I'd go insane…

"Follow the rules?" The boy hissed, his eyes narrowed, "All we've been doin' for the past three weeks is followin' your bloody rules! Locked up in this buggin' tin can for three weeks with nothing to do but bang our heads together! There's a kid over there –" He gestured towards the bundle in the corner, his voice getting louder. "Who's been cryin' his little head off since Paris – if that isn't 'greatly unsettled' I don't know what bloody is! You said you wanted us to help you – you never mentioned turning us into buggin' Cranks in the process! I'm tellin' ya', I'm going barmy – we all are!"

It was obvious that this kid was throwing every nasty word he had in his worn-out brain at the man, but the employee just took it silently, arms folded, waiting for the boy to finish. He reached out his hands, placing them firmly on the blond's shoulders, locking eyes with him. Very passive aggressive.

"There are only six more hours to go – you have been a model subject so far – keep going. As for Master Churchill – he is adjusting; rest assured his distress will pass. Now, unless you want to spend the journey alone, follow Mr Einstein's example."

There was something else in the man's voice, not just threat but knowledge. He knew that confinement would silence the boy – and whatever he knew, he was right. The kid's eyes were smouldering and his fists were clenched, but he turned his back on the employee and threw himself onto the wooden floor. The man smiled to himself, evidently considering this a victory, and left, closing the door with a bang – one final insult.

"Good riddance." The dark skinned boy, punched his friend lightly on the shoulder and muttered something very uncomplimentary about the man that I am not about to repeat.

Listening to the two boys suddenly made my think of my Mom and what her face would look like if she could hear them. Any one of the words they were tossing around would have given her a 'fit of the vapours' and had her scrubbing my mouth out with carbolic soap! The thought made me laugh quietly as I pictured her cupping her hands over my ears, "Close your ears darling, there are youths present." The way she'd say it, as if the very idea of swearing 'youths' appalled her.

But the blond boy looked up then, his face still flushed (with embarrassment or anger, I couldn't tell) catching the smile as it faded from my lips. He scowled, giving me a filthy glare- the resentment painted clearly on his face, curled his lip and spat:

"Well we can't all talk like the bloody Queen, Princess!"


	4. Lily

**Chapter 4 - Lily**

"Well we can't all talk like the bloody Queen, Princess!"

Well then. Looking back at the situation, the guy had obviously had a pretty rough day (actually, scrap that – a pretty rough fortnight), and he thought I was sneering at his accent - which he'd probably already got some abuse for. So, his response was pretty understandable, but after the day I'd had, I was tired, confused and generally all-round grouchy; so the boy didn't exactly receive my friendliest reaction. Black, Sam, W.I.C.K.E.D and FJ had used up all of the friendliness I usually reserved for jerks. I met his eyes, amber for brown.

"Clearly" I retorted coldly, in my mother's uptown accent – about as far from his backstreet drawl as I could get – and turned back to Karly, about to accept that I'd made a dangerous-looking enemy within two hours of being on the train, when the boy's face suddenly changed. He shook his head sharply, as if trying to get rid of something and pushed himself up from the slatted floor, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands and began to walk towards us, a sheepish look on his face. Just in case I hadn't noticed the change in the situation, Karly elbowed me hard in the ribs and waggled her eyebrows, giving the boy her 'hard stare' (something that quickly became a signature move) obviously unimpressed, as he paused, rearranging his limbs to sit in front of us.

"Hiya" He said, running a hand through his hair with an apologetic – and sort of disgusted - expression. "I'm sorry, that was rude. Really gittish – oh, bloody hell, this is embarrassing," The boy looked back to the spot he'd sat in, screwing his face up, and even with his new-found goodwill, he seemed hilariously flustered: "I don't even know what that buggin' was – Twenty one days in a midget train with a bunch of whingin' teens, these total prats they call employees and the poor sap in the corner's makin' me bloody schizophrenic."

He said the last part with his brown eyes wide and his hands in front of him, as if he was warning me off the madness I'd stepped into, before pointing at his older friend, who had stood up and was talking to Minho (now happily back in an upside-down position).

"If anyone's gonna be a lovin' pessimist, it's him, not me – I'm tellin' ya, you give the guy a unicorn, he'd tell ya' it was a rhino…." Rolling his eyes, he stopped for breath and seemed to peter off a bit:

"…Aaand I'm gonna shut it now and let ya' speak 'cause I'm rambling and I do that when I don't know what to say and I want ya' to believe me and it's always bloody stupid – So, I-I didn't mean that –I-I'm really sorry…" He looked up at me through his matted fair hair, the sheepish smile still on his face, as he waited for me to answer him.

Honestly, I was panicking a bit too – the boy had given me so much information in his strange, thick accent, so quickly that I was still translating the last half of it a full 30 seconds after he'd finished – I didn't have the slightest clue what to tell him. Karly was (luckily) seated too far to my right for him to see her, but was shaking her head, making crossing motions across her throat and mouthing 'NO. NO." But I'd already decided that I didn't want enemies (particularly not any as big as this guy's friends) and I hadn't exactly been nice enough to deserve his winning apology, so I ignored Karly and stammered,

"No, no – I-It's okay, it's okay, it's fine – I wasn't laughing at you – but it's okay, I wasn't friendly either – so, we're even, I guess – it's cool."

'It's cool'? What?! Since when do I ever use that? Since when does anyone ever use that? Karly sighed noisily and threw her head into her hands, but the boy visibly relaxed and immediately broke into a blinding, if slightly crooked, megawatt grin – he was obviously back on home ground. He looked like this was the kind of smile he gave to people all the time – the kind of person who smiles at old people and babies and children and everything else that breathes. A people person. He was so busy blinding us that he didn't seem to notice my grimace at myself and I was about to say something 'eloquent' to make up for it, but he was talking again:

"Thanks – that's brilliant!" Choosing to upgrade from the freezing floor, he pulled himself up into the hostile space on the bench between me and the punks. "I'm Newt, by the way."

"Newt? What kind of a name is 'Newt'?" Karly was determined not to like the guy, her nose wrinkled with the question, almost sneering. He looked across at her, either choosing to ignore her scathing tone or honestly not noticing it, and answered reluctantly, screwing his own face up as he did:

"Ugh! Well, actually–" Newt jerked a thumb back towards the door of the compartment, his voice mocking, "They told me it's 'Isaac Newton'but - no bloody way. What chance does a London street kid have of livin' up to the guy who discovered buggin' gravity? I mean, I came here to be an actually worthwhile version of myself, not a pathetic echo of somebody else. He can keep his stupid name – I don't want it. Plus, it's not like I'm really breakin' their rule. Just…bending it."

"So we've got ourselves a badass?" Okay, I was wrong. I'd forgotten how impressed Karly was by 'bad boys'. Anyone who broke the rules was instantly super-cute, regardless of what the person actually looked like – all negatives instantly vanished. She smiled at him, but Newt suddenly looked awkward and – giving a short laugh - immediately turned the conversation away from himself.

"Not exactly… Yeah, so I'm Newt - Call me Isaac at ya' own bloody risk – and that buggin' ray of sunshine over there's Alby – talk to him full stop at ya' own risk."

Hearing his name (and Newt's teasing comment) the dark-skinned boy spun round and began to stride across the carriage towards us. Alby was pretty much the polar opposite of Newt; he was a little shorter but muscular and sturdy, his strength clear in every step he took. I glanced at the door, surprised he hadn't left a dent in the floorboards when the W.I.C.K.E.D worker threw him in - it looked like you could drive a double-decker bus into the guy and he wouldn't even flinch. Where Newt had ambled over; his gait making it seem like he had all day to get there, Alby really did stride – walking with a purpose that would have been intimidating had it not been for the playful glint in his eyes. When he reached us, he swatted Newt across the back of the head with a smirk, making the boy slip off the bench with a surprised yelp, before grinning at us.

"Alby Einstein." His voice was deeper than I'd expected - he held his hand out and we shook it in turn, "Welcome to hell! I'm surprised this one hasn't yapped your ears off yet – 'S been a fortnight and I haven't said jack so far, it's so hard to get a word in"

Newt made an injured noise from the floor, dragging himself slowly back up next to me and shooting Alby an aggrieved look.

"Oww - I think you broke my tailbone…" He grumbled, before flashing him a more pained version of his usual smile, "But ya' love me really!"

"Yeah, sure." Alby answered, rolling his eyes. "So, when'd you pair get on? Never noticed ya' before."

Karly huffed and tossed her hair, obviously taking that as some kind of personal insult. "That," she said, "is because we weren't here before. We got on this morning – you?"

The two of them then launched into a conversation that was more than a little passive aggressive and Newt laughed quietly under his breath. I took that to mean he was listening to them, so when he tapped me lightly on the shoulder, I assumed it was an accident 'til he did it again.

"Hey," he said, "Me and my big mouth – I never asked your name, and I'm getting sorta tired of calling ya' Princess in my head."

"S'okay," That seemed to be becoming my catchphrase, "I'm Lilianne Pasteur … You can laugh, it's funny." It was the second time I'd told someone my name and it definitely wasn't getting any less embarrassing, but Newt didn't pull a face or laugh at me; just shook his head.

"That's funny? Sorry, did ya' hear my name? I am – out of choice – a lizard for life. Come on, that's funny. Yours is nice – it's posh." He looked me up and down, but not in the creepy way Sam had, "Doesn't suit ya' though – it's nice to meet ya', Lily."

Lily... Lily Pasteur... Yes. I smiled at the boy and it felt like the first genuine smile I'd shown since getting up that morning – something that now seemed aeons ago. Lily… I liked that.

Of course, all of the usual introductory small talk that my mother loved kicked in about then. I'd always hated it –Who cared if this stranger had a soccer-playing older brother or lived in a flat in a quarantine town with fifteen cats and a budgie? But now, with people my own age (rather than the crazy hamster lady who'd lived next door at home), and in this screwed-up nightmare situation, it wasn't that bad. Minho walked over to join us, and I told them about my town, my parents, my house arrest "So basically, you lived 'Tangled?" and the way Dad had gone missing – thank God, they didn't give me the pitying looks and the apologetic nothings that usually followed the last bit. Newt told us that he'd been on the train from the start in London – and it hadn't just been a train either – it had been a plane, a coach, a number of ships and a Berg to get to where we were then. Curious, I tried to ask him about his home and his family, but he clammed up instantly at that, giving an vague answer about 'somewhere on the outskirts' , before grilling Alby about his hometown – although having been on the same train as him for a fortnight, Newt must have known the answer. Karly and I exchanged glances – what was he hiding?

Karly's life had actually been pretty similar to mine, just minus the protectiveness. Instead of hiding out in her room, Karly had been one of the rebels, risking it out in a parking lot with the local boys. Alby had lived with his gran in one of the protected cities here in the US and had got on the coach a week after Newt. Minho had lived in a training facility in Korea anyway because of his Dad and reckoned he was pretty fit – though he hated running. He was just in the middle of a funny story about the time he 'borrowed' his Mom's German Shepherd cause he wanted to ride it round a race track, when all the lights went out.

"Ahh!" Karly shrieked and clutched at Minho – which he sounded rather smug about, and some others made sounds of surprise but Newt and Alby just groaned.

"Here we bloody go…"

"What is it? What's going on?" I asked Newt, tapping him on the shoulder hurriedly – at least, I assumed it was him.

"Ah, nothin' – keep your undies on, all of ya' – happens every night. They take the phrase 'lights out' buggin' seriously here." He gave a soft laugh and yawned as Alby added:

"Ain't nothin' to do but quit your piping and sleep – they give us exactly nine hours, so you might as well use it, kid."

I felt the boys move away a bit as someone took blankets down from the baggage compartments; the metal doors making an ear-splitting screeching noise as they creaked open, and started throwing the blankets around the room randomly – there was no real point in aiming. I caught one as Karly (I knew it was her, I could smell her perfume) reached out to grab my hand and pulled herself closer to where I was sitting.

"It's scarier now it's dark." She whispered to me, her previously confident voice shaking a little.

"Hey," I squeezed her hand, in what I hoped was a reassuring way, "It's all right, you know. We're still in a rusty carriage with a load of drama queens and cocky morons on the track to nowhere. We'll be fine."

She laughed shakily as Minho – who obviously hadn't moved that far – called out:

"Sure thing – which one am I?"

"The drama queen…" Newt's voice, from somewhere in front of me, much sleepier now than it had been a few minutes ago, "Now shut ya' hole and buggin' sleep – we'll be there before the lights come up."

As I lay back against the wall of the train, feeling the thrum of the engine vibrating through the metal, I suddenly processed what Newt had said. We'd be there – wherever there was. And it was sort of ironic, plunging us into darkness like this; a metaphor for what was to come. Complete blackness – we had an idea of what was in it, but no-one was sure about what lurked there. Technically we weren't by ourselves – there were others– but for all we knew about them and for all we could see of them we might as well have been alone. The crippling terror was short-lived in the dark, but the uneasiness was always there and the sense of knowing that the only way out of it was to endure and wait for the dawn. So ironic, it's almost funny, actually. But the lack of light eventually had the same effect on me that it did on the others, and I lost the will to think very hard about it and about W.I.C.K.E.D and what the morning would bring… what does it matter?... I thought… it's not like I'm gonna have a choice…

At some point, I must have fallen asleep because the next thing I remember is someone shaking me and hissing:

"Lily… Lily,"

"Ugh…" Without opening my eyes, I lashed out at the someone and groaned – I'm not a morning person. "Go away…" Unfortunately, they didn't.

"Lily!"

"Mmmm…. What?"

This time I tried to open my eyes blearily. Nobody else seemed to be awake, as nothing but silence filled the air, broken only by the occasional snuffles and snores. It definitely wasn't morning, because I could see the moonlight streaming through the gaps in the blinds – something that only increased my irritation with whoever had woken me up, until a shaft of light fell on the person next to me and I saw it was Newt. He also looked half-asleep, but there was an excited light in his brown eyes that panicked me. So, ignoring my previous annoyance, I hurriedly pushed myself up from under the blanket, rubbing the sleep from my eyes.

"What's happened? What's wrong?" He shook his head and touched a finger to his lips, 'shhh', before taking my hand, dragging me up, over to the bench nearest the windows before clambering onto the windowsill and motioning for me to do the same. I did, with little difficulty, having done it so many times in my window seat at home. He raised his eyebrows, seemingly impressed but was quickly distracted by whatever he'd wanted to show me.

"Look!" Newt's voice was an excited whisper, cutting through the silence of the room as he brushed back the scratchy blinds and pointed out of the window, "Look, Lily!"

I leant forward, craning my neck to try and see whatever he was so worked up about, rather than the train tracks I could see at the moment. It took a couple of seconds, "Do ya' see it?" 's and pressing my face against the glass attractively before I finally did. In the distance, somewhere near the end of the track was a village – no, not even that – a collection of buildings that were all white paint and blue strips, with lights in the windows. A large, illuminated sign that I couldn't quite read lit up the darkness around it. It was beautiful, in a harsh sort of way. Far prettier than my hometown, despairing, crumbling and Flare-ravaged – almost as pretty as some of the towns I remembered seeing on television – all neon lights and laughter. It was a mismatch of shapes against the black skyline, striking in the moonlight.

"It's beautiful.." I breathed, still unsure why Newt had woken me up to show me. He nodded but sighed irritably, like I was missing the point.

"Well, yes, but look harder."

Confused, I looked again, forcing my eyes to focus on the glaring sign. Gradually, my eyes adjusted to the lights – and there it was, plain as daylight – I wondered how on earth I'd missed it before. 'The letters W-I-C-K-E-'D, were painted first, taking up almost all of the board, but in smaller writing at the bottom of the board were the words, 'SUBJECT TRAINING CENTRE.' Instantly, all the majestic beauty of the place melted away and a cold fear settled in my stomach. Newt looked across and knew I'd seen it, his eyes – unlike mine, which I am certain reflected my stomach's feelings here – were alight with nervous energy. He flashed me a slightly uncertain smile:

"This is it. It's starting."

  
  



	5. Small Kids And Cereal Bars

**Chapter 5 – Small Kids And Cereal Bars**

It took about half an hour for the flashes of bright moonlight to wake the others in the carriage, and the same again for everyone to actually be conscious enough to react to our new surroundings. Our plunge into darkness and silence had happened in minutes, nobody really speaking – reversing the process was harder. Some of us – like Newt and me –were awake already, moving from blanket bundle to blanket bundle, shaking shoulders and coaxing people out of their fogginess. Others, like Harriet and Dmitri, were awake in seconds, brushing off sleep like you'd brush off dust. Oh, to have a talent like that, I thought enviously, as Karly desperately fought off my efforts to bring her back to the land of the living, pushing my hands away and whining:

"Nooooo – it's dark… You're so cruel, Lily."

Looking around at the glassy eyes and vacant faces in the carriage, I doubted that some of the subjects had slept at all – the poor kid in the corner had popped his head out of his cocoon to ask for a drink at one point – but his eyes were bloodshot and his tiny voice scratchy. Watching them, I suddenly felt really selfish; I'd been grumpy and depressing over being on this metal monster for a day but, if Newt had been tracking the days correctly; some of them had been here for almost a month – I couldn't believe no-one had thrown themselves out of a window yet!

But, anyway, Alby's idea had been to get everyone together to have a calm, mature discussion about what we were doing next – which seemed like a great plan at the time – but as soon as more than half the carriage was awake, the news spread like wildfire and the room exploded into total chaos. People were flying around the small space, pressing themselves against the windows and shouting, scrabbling around on the floor for belongings that had rolled, some people burst into tears, others squealed and bounced around - it was a scene of absolute panic. Everyone was freaking out and I was just about to pack it in and join them, when I caught sight of Minho sitting on the bench nearby with his eyes closed, humming tunelessly. Momentarily fascinated, I forgot my meltdown and, stepping over the people crawling about, sat down next to him.

"What are you doing!?" I shouted into his ear.

"Shutting them out!" He yelled back, "Seriously, there should be a limit on how high these people are legally allowed to scream – I feel like I'm on the set of freaking 'Alvin and the Chipmunks 2'!"

I laughed and copied him, pulling my knees up to my chest and started to sing 'Don't Stop Believing' loud enough to block out the chipmunks, butMinho's humming cut out instantly and he arched an eyebrow at me.

"What? It has the word 'train' in it!"

It was Minho's turn to laugh then, displaying his rows of perfectly straight, white teeth as he did. He shook his head despairingly at me, but immediately joined in at an ear-splitting volume; catching Karly's attention as she sashayed over to join in. I was surprised by how well it worked – we were so busy laughing and screeching our way through the verses that the noise of the others just disappeared – though you could say it worked too well. Everyone else did gradually stop freaking because of how loudly we were assaulting their eardrums, and they either sneered and turned their backs - calling us 'psycho losers' - or laughed and jumped onto the mega-cheesy, dangerously off-key bandwagon. Sure, it was one of the weirdest, randomest moments of my life, and there was definitely something slightly hysterical about it – but, by giving us a moment of total hysteria, I guess W.I.C.K.E.D accidentally gave us one of the biggest tips on surviving the trials. Stick together and work as a team – individually we panicked and gave ourselves miniature heart attacks but when we got together, we not only got a grip, but performed some kick-ass karaoke! Life lesson right there.

Newt had been sitting in the corner 'till then, obviously trying to talk to the blanket kid and convince him to eat one of the cereal bars we'd been given last night. I couldn't hear the words, but judging by Newt's exhausted expression, it seemed to be going round in circles. But then, the second we started singing, Newt's face split into a grin and he pushed the cereal bar at the kid, ruffling his hair and stood up, loping over to stand in front of me. He leant against one of the metal bars and started tapping a beat on the floor of the carriage with his foot, laughing as he did it.

"Come on, man!" Minho reached up and punched him in the arm, "Stop freaking tap-dancing and sing!"

And when I played this back afterwards, this was the part I never understood: When Minho said that, for a split-second, Newt's eyes lit up like a kid who'd been given free rein in a candy store and he opened his mouth like he was going to join in, but then his expression flickered suddenly and he just snorted and rolled his eyes – though he never stopped tapping out the beat with his foot:

"Yeah … I don't sing."

There was a moment there, as Karly would say, where you could actually taste the awkward. Nobody quite knew what to say – but luckily, two things happened at once that shattered the silence and the awkward. The door to our carriage banged open. And the train stopped.

Everyone who'd been sitting on the floor or lounging around scrambled to their feet, whispering and shooting glances out of the window as four W.I.C.K.E.D workers pushed their way into the already crowded room. The view was exactly what Newt had shown me earlier on, just closer - the mismatch of blue-white buildings with their towering signs. The others were all gasping over it, but what surprised me most was the enormous number of people milling around outside. Obviously, I expected there to be people at the facility already, but lots of the people here were my age – some a little older, some a bit younger – and nobody there turned to look at our train as it sat there. Were they workers? Or were they the same as us – sold and trapped? One of the workers – a small blond woman with friendly blue eyes and a calming voice – stood on a chair in front of us and raised her voice over the anxious hum of noise that had erupted.

"Kids! Kids! … Thank you. I know you're all very confused and you want to ask us a million questions, but right now I need to you focus and follow our instructions. As soon as you enter the facility, you will be taken to an assembly with the Chancellor where everything will become crystal clear, okay? Okay. Welcome to W.I.C.K.E.D – I'm Ava Paige and I'm going to be one of your training instructors while you're here, I hope you all had a comfortable journey."

A number of incredulous snorts and shouts filled the air at that, but Ava Paige just raised her hands and everyone fell silent again.

"All right – maybe 'comfortable' wasn't the right word, but you all did exceedingly well. Now, I need you kids to file off the train in an orderly fashion and line up outside according to the number on your identification – A's on the left, B's on the right. – Okay everyone, let's go."

Still sort of stunned, we all picked up what belongings we had and started to file out of the carriage silently. As our random High School Musical moment had taken place on the benches at the back, we were the last to leave the room. Newt pushed himself up off the pole he'd leant on and slung an arm across Alby's shoulders, spinning him around to look at the carriage.

"Ya' know, I think I'm kinda gonna miss this place." He said; a sarcastic smile on his face.

"Hell yeah – it's gonna be torture to sleep on an actual bed for once." Alby grinned and shoved Minho out of the double doors before jumping out himself, "Come on, Newton. Don't wanna be late for the Chancellor."

Newt beckoned to me with a grin and turned to the doors, "Ya' ready, Lil?"

I nodded and was about to follow him, when I heard a sniffle. I looked back to the corner of the carriage and I saw the blanket bundle still there, quivering. In the rush to get out of the doors, no-one had noticed the boy– the crush must have panicked him and the sniffling was rapidly building back up to a wail again. Newt hadn't heard it, so I called out:

"Newt! Tell them I'll be a second – I'm in B group. I've just got to-" Newt spun back to me and saw the kid too. He sighed and his forehead creased up.

"Oh bloody hell; gettin' him to move will take another day… Look, let's go and tell that Ava woman, they'll come and get him – seriously, he won't listen to us – I've been trying since buggin' France."

"He's French?" Maybe that'd help – I was awful at French but it was something. Newt saw the look on my face and shook his head again.

"Well, yeah, I think so, he seems to speak English– but Lil, come on. We gotta go!"

"No. They'll terrify him even more than we did. He's never going to settle in if he doesn't at least trust some of us – you go, tell them I'm coming."

He sighed again and walked back to me, placing a hand on my shoulder. I jumped a little in surprise at the contact - Oh get a grip, I told myself, He gave you an electric shock from the railing. Help the kid.

"Ya' sure you don't want me to stay?" I stepped out from under his hand and began to walk towards the boy.

"No, it's fine –go!"

With a final lopsided smile, he did and I turned my attention back to the boy. Take it slow. I sat down on the bench next to the blankets and tentatively laid my hand on the first one to pull it back, wondering briefly if I should have let Newt stay – I had zero experience with children. When the kid didn't lash out or anything, I slowly peeled away the blankets one by one, like layers off an onion, placing them on the floor. The boy was young, even younger than I'd thought – maybe seven or eight. He was actually quite a pretty kid – his hair was all thick black curls and his eyes looked like they were bright blue normally, but they were swollen and red-rimmed from all the crying, the olive skin around them all puffed up. Looking at his little face, screwed up with abject misery made me so angry with W.I.C.K.E.D I could barely breathe.

Finally, painstakingly, I got down to the last blanket – a tattered pale blue thing, that I was sort of disgusted W.I.C.K.E.D had actually given to us – and reached out to take it off, when the boy let out an ear-piercing shriek, pushing me away and started to scream at the top of his tiny lungs, the tears starting to stream again. Oh no.

"Whoa, whoa, whoa! Okay, okay!" I reached into the blankets on the floor and picked up his ID tag, backing away with my hands up. "It's okay… Winston."

On hearing his name, he stopped ripping up his lungs. He clutched the thin blue blanket to his chest and looked up at me, whispering through cracked lips:

" 'S mine. They tried to take it away." His distrusting blue eyes brimmed again and part of my heart broke.

"It's okay, Winston – I'm not gonna take it."

"It's my blankie and I want it."

That was it – and I don't know what this was, my inbuilt motherly instinct or something – but I reached out to Winston and wrapped the blanket around his shoulders again, picked him gently up off the splintered bench and set him onto his feet.

"It's a beautiful blankie – but I promise you get to keep it. Now, how about we take blankie outside, so he can breathe some fresh air, okay? He must've hated it cramped in here…"

Winston gave me a strange look, then suddenly started to laugh – and I almost started crying myself, I cannot tell you how relived I was right then.

"Well…he does want to get off the train, but he doesn't breathe, silly! He's a blankie!"

The kid went off into peals of laughter at the idea and let me take his hand and lead him over to the door of the compartment. I almost thought I had this, when we reached the double doors and Winston slammed on the breaks. He stuck his head out of the door, seeing all of the buildings and the other kids – who were now trying to sort themselves into long lines – and then jerked it back in, a frightened expression on his face.

"I don't like it." He decided, "Who are you? Where are we? Those people kept poking me and throwing things at me and telling me to be quiet, when I didn't want to be quiet, I wanted to cry, but they wouldn't let me! They're all nasty people… Blankie doesn't want to go out there. Ever…"

I knelt down to his level then and pulled him back to the doorway, so we could see out of it. My friends were standing together, clustered at the front of some of the rows and I pointed to them.

"My name's Lily, kiddo – and trust me, I'm not letting anything happen to blankie or you okay? And you see those people there?" He nodded, "Those are my friends – and they aren't nasty. The shortest one's Minho – he can do a somersault, just like in the circus and he's nice! The girl with the blonde hair's Karly – she's got a little brother about your age, she's nice and the tall one's Newt –"

Winston wrinkled his nose, "He made me eat a cereal bar. It tasted like dirt."

"Oh." I grimaced, "Um… Well, I'm sure he didn't mean it! But, we need you to come and line up with the boys now, okay? And we'll protect you from the nasty ones, I promise."

The little boy looked up at me then, as if he was considering it – considering me. His eyes stared at my face for a long time, checking I was telling the truth and wasn't just going to snatch his blankie away and lock him up the second he let his guard down, until he finally nodded slowly and asked warily, holding out his little finger:

"Do you pinky promise?"

"I pinky promise."

Winston's face, still tired and a bit tear-stained, broke into a smile and he put his little hand into mine, squeezed it and jumped off the train with a yell, dragging me with him. When we landed hard on the grass next to the other subjects, he shrieked and spun round to me, his hands on his hips.

"Come on, Lily – you're so slow.”


	6. Corridors, Canteens and Blue Plastic Chairs

**Chapter 6 – Corridors, Canteens and Blue Plastic Chairs**

While Winston and I were making our disruptive exit from the train, Ava Paige had been sorting the others into perfect, parallel lines outside the main building. Newt, Alby, Minho, Sam, Dmitri and some others I didn't recognise had been lined up in front of a sign simply labelled 'A', everyone clutching their plastic identity cards. An older lady with kind looking eyes swooped down on Winston the second we jumped out, and gave him a friendly smile, before leading him away and slotting him in behind Minho. As he was slotted in, he twisted his head back round, his blue eyes worried – like a baby owl, I thought – but I nodded to him, pointing at Minho, with what was supposed to be a reassuring expression and he stepped in (thankfully) without any screaming. Looking over at Group B, I pulled my ID from my pocket to check the number  **(Subject B5)** and walked fast to the front end of the line, sliding quietly into the gap between Sonya and Mariella.

"Is that it? Is everybody off?" Ava Paige leant down to a young man with a clipboard, who whispered something in her ear. "Fantastic! Thank you for exiting the train so efficiently, everyone – your cooperation was highly impressive. Now, we have exactly sixteen minutes to assemble you all in the Lecture Theatre for 'The Chancellor's Welcome', so we need to move move move! Nick, Harriet – follow Dr Robins into the Theatre, lead your lines – let's go!"

There was a moment of confusion as everyone tried to work out who Dr Robins was, but once we'd established that he was the small, grey-haired man with a tweedy suit and glasses who looked like he'd just stepped out of the 1980's, the lines started to crawl warily forwards, following him towards the huge glass doors of the building.

Okay. I'm going to tell you this now – as a friendly warning – if you are ever interested in getting large groups of people (particularly hyperactive and emotional teenagers) into your nice, expensive building never ever make the only entrance a revolving door. Ava Paige had planned it so well – getting us all through the doors, three in each compartment, would take precisely eight minutes, leaving us another eight to reach the Lecture Theatre. Except, she forgot to factor in the thrill of really seeing one of these things after the Sun Flares and the inevitable pushing of the automatic doors that followed, just to see how fast they went – as it turned out: way too fast for us to actually get out into the reception and not just get spat back out onto the pavement again. It took fifteen minutes, a lot of W.I.C.K.E.D employees getting red in the face and shouting and – I was impressed – only four slammed fingers to get us all into the lobby to count off. I think we may have just convinced Ava Paige never to have children.

The lobby itself was a lot smaller than it looked from the outside – and there were a whole lot more people. Despite our deafening racket, almost nobody in the place turned a head– there were people tapping away at wall length screens with complex diagrams flashing across them, people running between rooms in blue shirts and white coats, people yelling instructions into mobile phones, people sitting on benches, eating like food was an inconvenience – tens of people, but nobody taking any notice of the twenty-six teens that were all staring, eyes wide at the organised chaos.

Ava Paige took in our faces and smiled, snapping her fingers and glancing at the clock pointedly.

"All right children – everything will be explained shortly. If we rush, we can still get there five minutes late!"

She signalled us toward the mouth of a long corridor and we followed her in our lines down what seemed like hundred of passageways, twisting and sloping down into the heart of the building – every corridor identical to the last. It gave me a strange feeling of being trapped – if we didn't know which one got us in, how could we know which one got us out? Sonya's forehead was wrinkled and she leaned backwards to whisper:

"This is horrid – I feel like we're stuck in an everlasting therapist's office!"

Mariella snorted and I grinned – I saw her point. The walls were painted a nasty coral colour and every one had 'calming' photographs of beautiful places before the Flares, bright flowers and sky-scraping trees, every five paces. It was supposed to be relaxing but with the hundreds of questions buzzing through our heads like hornets and nothing but the noise of our own feet on the floorboards ringing in our ears, the atmosphere just put us on edge – it's safe to say everyone was relieved when Ava finally stopped at a sign reading 'Lecture Theatre'. She turned round and raised her eyebrows.

"Ten minutes late, everyone? Not really a very good start, is it? Oh well, you can make up for it tomorrow –" At that slightly odd statement, people started muttering – what was happening tomorrow? – But Ava just did the hand thing again and the corridor fell silent.

"Now, file in silently, take your seats and the Chancellor will begin."

One of the other W.I.C.K.E.D workers swiped a card at the side of the door, sliding it open and our lines advanced again, down pristine white steps into the hall, where the Chancellor was waiting. The actual hall was the exact opposite of the corridors we'd just come through – and everything was white. Everything. The white didn't even vary either, the ceiling was white, the polished linoleum floor was white, there were white plastic chairs set up in front of a white projected board – even the Chancellor's perfectly tailored suit was a blinding chalk colour against the podium he stood at. One of the boys – Jackson; I think his name was - groaned from the next row and threw his hands across his face:

"Argh! My eyes!"

There were some scattered chuckles from around the room, but everyone else's eyes were fixed on the Chancellor. He was a tall, middle-aged man with bright eyes and a kind smile, though the overall effect was diminished slightly by his noticeably receding hairline. The label on his suit lapel read 'CHANCELLOR JOHN MICHAEL.' He continued to smile at us with creepily perfect teeth as everyone shuffled into the chair with their number on it and tried to push their belongings, with some effort, into the space below. Finally, when everyone had finished fussing, the Chancellor walked over to Ava Paige, took some papers out of her hands and knocked loudly on the podium with a wooden mallet he'd pulled from somewhere –not that that was really necessary (you could've heard a pin drop) but he'd probably been waiting to do it all day.

"Welcome, children," He began, with a voice that was just a little rougher than I'd imagined, "My name is Chancellor Michael and I am here to give you a very warm welcome from everybody here at W.I.C.K.E.D – we are delighted to have you all on board for the mission that is sure to go down in every history book from now. People will hear of your bravery for generations to come and we thank you for your help in advance. Now, I promise to keep this relatively short, as the extensive journey here will have tired you all and – knowing kids – will have also made you very hungry! So, as you all know why you're here, I will not go into that. I expect it is a painful and different topic for each one of you. At W.I.C.K.E.D, we believe in looking to the future, so I will tell you what I can about your immediate futures, rather than lingering on the world's past.

"You have been selected for a number of trials because you are all immeasurably special – some in different ways to others. These trials and tests are being conducted to study your brain patterns to develop a cure for the Flare – however, the trials cannot actively take place for quite some time – months, maybe even years in the future. For the time in between you will be trained and taught how to perform to your very best during them. "We will try our hardest to give you a high quality of life here at W.I.C.K.E.D and to protect you from the Flare for as long as we possibly can. Do not worry: there will be a Cure before any of you gets hurt. Those of you in this room today are not the only ones chosen to perform this task –together there are several hundred children – you are merely the last train of subjects to arrive. Therefore, you will be given time tonight to stock up on maps of the site and supplies for your work, and to rest, and your initial training will begin tomorrow, to define what you all have to work with. Do not despair if your performance tomorrow is poor – you have all come from a variety of different backgrounds and cultures, so the results themselves will vary. You will be given many opportunities to improve both your physical and mental strength before the testing takes place. Now, rant over."

He flashed us the bright white smile again as a huge door opened up behind him.

"If you have any questions, do not hesitate to ask. You may all exit in an orderly fashion through the door at my back – your belongings will be taken care of. Walk down this corridor, take three rights, a left, and another right, the second set of double doors on your left is the canteen entrance. Welcome to W.I.C.K.E.D children – I hope you will be very happy here. Enjoy your evening: work starts tomorrow."

And with that impersonal and slightly threatening finish, the Chancellor spun away from the podium and – accompanied by Ava Paige and all the other W.I.C.K.E.D workers – left the room via a (white) hidden side door. For a second, everyone was completely silent. Then, as usual, chaos took control – the information Chancellor Michael had given us hadn't exactly been surprising, we'd all expected about that, but ditching us in a white room in a giant building, with just one sentence of really messed up directions was not on the agenda. Most of the kids just ran out of the doors, obviously desperate to throw themselves into the maze that was behind them rather than stay in the white room any longer. Some people just sat down and waited for someone to come back for them.

"Hiya, kiddo."

I looked up to see Alby, with Minho and Newt close behind him. Karly was sitting at my feet, staring at the doors with her forehead crinkled, like if she stared long enough the instructions would appear long enough for us to write them down. It seemed like, almost by accident, the five of us had re-grouped. I tapped Karly on the shoulder and pulled her off the floor before turning to the boys:

"So what now? Is this a test? What do we do?"

Alby and Minho were silent, arms folded, but Newt suddenly snorted, making everyone jump.

"Isn't it bloody obvious? We all go out there-" He pointed back to the doors, the slightly surreal gleam in his eyes again, "- stop acting like sissy babies 'cause there's nobody to hold our hands on the way out and we find the main road - I'm tellin' ya - ya' think every one's exactly the same and it messes up your head, but there's always a road that leads everywhere – we just gotta find it!"

I was sort of impressed by Newt's idea and was standing up to go, but Alby raised his eyebrows with a teasing grin.

"Okay Bilbo Baggins, and when we find this 'magic road', we do what exactly?"

Newt huffed and looked more than a little offended, his hands on his hips. "Were you even listening? I never said jack about buggin' magic – ain't gonna need it – but when we get the central corridor, there will be people who know where the canteen is because food is sort of an important life source."

Alby rolled his eyes, but he was still smiling,

"Well, nobody's got a better idea – lead the way, kid."

In the end, I think we were all glad that Newt had taken charge – I don't know what he was seeing, but every corridor did look identical to me, and judging by the looks on the faces of the others, they didn't have much more of a clue. When half-an-hour had gone by, just turning left and right with not one person in the same corridor, Minho started to get a bit twitchy. He tried to bait Newt into an argument with comments about giraffe's and 'mind the ceiling' but the boy just pretended like he didn't hear – which only made it funnier for us watching, because Min got more and more worked up with every jibe Newt brushed off. The shorter boy was just about to implode and punch him when Newt stopped at a frosted door and put a finger to his lips:

"Guys, shh..." He gave Alby one of the most ridiculous smiles I've ever seen and pulled himself up even taller, if that was possible, as he pushed the door open. "I told ya' didn't I? Only lovin' magic round here is me."

Wow… anticlimax. For a second, I was embarrassed for him. This corridor looked exactly the same as every other one we'd trailed down, but as soon as we stepped forward, I got it. There were twice the number of doors here and – as there were only five of us – about ten times more people and most of them the same age as we were, everyone bustling around up different halls into different rooms . Minho exhaled and turned to Newt reluctantly.

"Dude, I have no freakin' idea how you just did that, but … respect."

Newt laughed, "I accept your lovin' apology! Just don't underestimate my power again…"

We decided that the best thing to do was just walk down the hall and look in all of the doors on the way – one of them had to be right – and as we did it, with Minho and Newt still bickering over Alby's shoulders and Karly whispering a rating under her breath for every male we passed, I suddenly felt a flash of affection for these guys. Come on – you've barely even spent a day with them. But, though I'd never been to high school and I was never going to get to– this was the closest I'd ever been to the things I'd spent hours dreaming about since I was seven. Just walking down a crowded hall, with absolutely no sense of direction, laughing and teasing each other 'cause there was nothing more important to do. It was actually quite a peaceful atmosphere - despite the chaos - until something so 'high-school cliché ' happened that it was sort of unbelievable.

"Hey loser! Watch where you're going!"

It was so like one of FJ's moron remarks that my head whipped around, but it happened so fast that nobody had time to move. An older looking guy with muscles like a wrestler, a black buzz cut and the menacing grin I'd seen on a million bullies back home, reached out and threw the boy who'd passed him across the hall, like the kid weighed no more than a feather. Karly screamed and Newt stepped forward to help but before he could react, the kid slammed into him with all the force of Buzz-Cut's Superman throw, sending him sprawling into a row of foldable blue plastic chairs that were lined up outside an office. The whole row went down like dominos, three or four landing on top of him with a crash as he fell.

"Oh my Gosh!" The kid – who had landed a few feet away – sprang up unhurt, horror plastered across his face. He took in Newt's grimace of pain as we helped him up and his admittedly intimidating height and the horror intensified. The boy ran over and tried to pick up one of the chairs across one of Newt's legs, all the while, spluttering panicked apologies.

"Oh my Gosh – I am so sorry, seriously – are you okay? Are you sure? Oh no, oh no, I'm am really really sorry, this is terrible – I knew I'd do something like this, my Mom told me I messed everything up - I'VE ONLY BEEN HERE THREE DAYS! I'm so, so sorry – are you alright?"

Newt rubbed the back of his neck and groaned.

"Yeah… Ugh, that hurts like a mother… Yeah, it's okay, I saw the bloody Neanderthal. I've had worse – plus, ya' hurt the chairs a little more than ya' hurt me, dont'cha think?"

We all looked across at the hall, which was now a sea of blue plastic – some of which I don't think could ever be bent back into shape again… The boy still looked guilty, despite the apology, and gave us a quavering smile.

"Probably… Thanks. I'm Gally, by the way - Gally Leonis – I'm thirteen. Can I, um, help you guys – consider it repayment for me almost crippling your friend?"

Newt snorted again and shook Gally's outstretched hand before introducing us all at a hundred miles an hour. "I told ya, kid, I've had way worse. Now, I'm not forcin' ya' or anythin' but, do ya' know where the Canteen is? We were sorta hopin' to get there before next week…"

The Canteen. Think about it. When I pictured that, I always pictured a tiny, grotty school hall with five tables. Lies – it's all lies. The W.I.C.K.E.D canteen was bigger than my whole backyard. There were at least fifty tables in there, with more than a hundred people milling around, eating, chatting, laughing. It looked so perfect, I half-expected Zac Efron to jump out of a closet and start doing a choreographed dance number on the tables. On entrance, we were each given a silver token, with 'W' embossed on it.

"Food tokens" Gally told us. "They say we'll have different ones during training to match our body type, but for now we've all got these standard ones. It's just to make sure no-one eats like a pig."

Going into the huge Canteen had made us all realise just how hungry we were – the last thing I'd eaten was a cereal bar the night before – so we all headed over to the line of people at the food desk, hoping that the range of food was actually edible compared to the stuff on the train. Unfortunately, it became blindingly obvious as we got to the front of the line that the people at W.I.C.K.E.D were 99% scientist and 1% cook.

We stood there, looking at the five different coloured 'meals' – all a weird, liquefied mash with suspiciously shaped lumps floating in it – all looking at each other like, you first! Finally Alby spoke:

"Well, there's six of us… if we all try a different coloured gloop then someone has to come with halfway average gloop…" He said it hopefully, his deep voice rising like a question.

"That's bloody awful thinking." Newt answered, eyeing the pinkish stuff closest to him, warily.

"It's not thinking," Minho laughed, "It's 'wild-guess-hope-we-don't-freaking-choke'-ing… Let's do it!"

Then, a whole lot of childish behaviour ensued – which I am not embarrassed to say I enjoyed – with everyone fighting over the six different colours:

"I'm having the red one!"

"No way, man – I totally called dibs on the red one!"

"Sucks for you!"

"You cannot leave me with the sludge coloured one guys – I hate you all!"

"Meh, I can live with the pain…"

Can I just say (as the storyteller, I am allowed to be biased), I totally won that. The sludge one tasted like raspberries – if you forgot about what you were actually eating. The red one was a complete let down, and Minho actually gagged (apparently it was pickle, but I'm not sure anyone would be that cruel). But when we'd all finished – after a lot of gloop sharing out and an unholy amount of tap-water – we all had tears pouring down our faces. Karly reached across me and punched Minho in the arm.

"Our first daring act at W.I.C.K.E.D. – Well done squad."

Even now, looking back, that was one of the best days I can remember – 'cause it was all downhill from there.


	7. Eggshells, Egos and Early Mornings

**Chapter 7 – Eggshells, Egos and Early Mornings**

**Newt's P.O.V**

Eggshells. 'We have to walk on eggshells' she tells me. I've spent three years trying to walk on them – desperately faking different smiles, cowering in different corners, being a thousand different people – but every time I hear the eggshells crack and shatter under my feet. I'm too pathetic, too clumsy, too big to ever hide for long… yet I'm always too small to protect her.

"For God's sake, stop bloody humming, boy!"

I'm ten years old, sitting at a table. He's across from me, a newspaper gripped in his weathered hands. She'd gone out, a scarf round her neck as she kissed me goodbye - but I saw the ugly blue-black stain across her jaw. She sang to me the day before, whispering the notes into my ear. I hadn't noticed I was humming them. Stupid, stupid, stupid. That will have been the first straw.

I clamp my mouth shut, trying to breathe noiselessly as I always do, casting my eyes down to the floor. I feel his glare wash over me, then a tidal wave of relief as his paper rustles – he's gone back to it. Silent, I pick up my pencil and continue to scratch her face into the notepad. The clock in the corner is ticking quietly, the noise strangely reminding me of a time-bomb as his pages turn and my hand glides across the cream-coloured paper. My breathing returns to normal. But then the kitchen window slams shut and I can't help it – I jump up, sweeping all my pencils off the table with an almighty clatter.

A flash of terror, painfully familiar, rips through my chest as I hit the ground, pushing it all back as quickly as it fell, not apologising, not speaking - not doing anything else that could make him snap. And for a second, nothing happens; he sits there silently, looking at the paper – just long enough for a sliver of hope to slip into my mind, as it always does – but it's only ever a second. His chair scrapes across the floor as he stands, his face eerily calm, and brushes his hand across the table, scattering my pencils again, but I don't move this time. I'm not sure I can; the fear is coursing through my veins like superglue, fixing me in place. He takes a step towards me and my breath hitches in my throat, but all he does is pick up the sketchpad and stare at her image. He stares at it for the longest time, the unnerving composure still hanging on his face, but I don't relax. I'm wondering what he's thinking, what his plan is this time – I know he has one. But I don't have to wonder long.

"You're pathetic." He sneers, slowly, deliberately ripping my drawing in half. It always starts with the sneering – trying to get me to react. I sometimes think he'd be happier if I did.

"She's been fillin' your buggin' head again, hasn't she? Fillin' it with music and bloody fairy-stories, like that's gonna pay the bills! The rent's overdue but if we sing a bloody lullaby and draw a pretty picture then it's all gonna be okay, huh?"

His voice is rising. I hate those questions - those questions that never have a right answer. I play it safe and do nothing. Wrong. He slams his fist down hard on the table, making me flinch, as he takes another two steps towards me. I can smell the beer on his breath as he leans down.

"Huh! You mute as well as lovin' brainless?!" I shake my head, taking a wary step backwards. The mask of calm is slipping. "Bloody hell! That woman'll be the death of me – singing like a choirboy and looking all nice n' pretty won't get you nowhere! Oh, you might buggin' worship her, boy, but that spineless harpy knows nothing! Nothing! She's a bloody coward - Do you hear me?!"

Oh, he knows my downfall. Again and again - I always do it and I always regret it – she always makes me regret it. I know that every time, but I feel that dangerous surge of pure anger for her and I do it anyway:

"She's not a coward!" I try to shout it, and my voice wavers. But that never matters to him. I'd said it, hadn't I? I'd challenged him. I don't care what he says about me – but he can't talk about her. He steps back then and a threatening grin slips onto his face.

"You know she is, the useless bitch – and you're just like her." I feel my hands curl into fists, even though I know that's what he wants. It's his excuse every time. He sees it and laughs – not her laugh, bright and musical, but dark and humourless. How is it possible to hate someone so much and be so pathetically terrified of them at the same time?

"Go on– hit me then, Daniel. Be a bloody man for once."

He spits my name at me, dripping with sarcasm. Daniel. 'Daniel in the Lion's Den' – I never missed the irony. This is the person he wants me to be. Like him. I want to hit him– I look at him, his powerful hands and his dangerous smirk and I see her and her bruised jaw, I hear her crying and I want to so much it hurts. But I can't, so I do what I'm best at – I run from him. Coward…

I turn my back on him and bolt into the next room. There isn't any point – the flat's ten floors up and the only door's behind him, but I never have a choice. All I get to pick is where it happens. I hear him thundering after me as I throw myself into the corner of my bedroom, my heart thumping in my ears. I haven't done anything, but then I never have. He hates me so much he doesn't need it. I curl up as small as I can, wrapping my arms over my head – She cries harder if he cuts my face. My breath is coming so fast that my head's spinning and all I can hear is my heartbeat as I wait for him.

He bursts in, the calm now completely shattered, shouting a barrage of abuse so loudly that I can barely pick out any of the words, before he descends on me. I hear his blow before I feel it, a dull echoing sound against my skull, and a split second later what feels like a grenade goes off above my left ear, making me gasp in pain. But there's no point in registering that. I screw my eyes shut and ignore the explosions across my body – my pain receptors just giving in completely as blow after blow hits me – I don't even know what he's doing anymore – kicking, punching, cutting – everything's just a blur of pain. Above the mist I can hear him screaming words like "PATHETIC!", "COWARD!", "SISSY!", "BRAT!", words that should hurt me, but they don't anymore. I'm numb.

"Not so pretty now, are you, you little freak?!"

He kicks at my fingers and I hear something crack and an echoing sound like a slamming door. I'm pretty sure I'm passing out until I hear the running footsteps… oh please, no. I don't even have to move my hands to know that it's her – her normally soft voice echoes around the room, fiercer than I ever remember it.

"DON'T YOU TOUCH HIM!" She runs into the room, her blonde hair falling around her face and her brown eyes black with fury. I want to tell her to run, that I'm okay, to get away from him, but my mouth won't open.

"DON'T YOU DARE TOUCH HIM!"

He turns away from me and my heartbeat speeds right back up, faster than before. 'Do something!' The voice in my head screams. But I can't. I'm paralysed watching them, as he towers over her, her fragile body looking even more delicate than ever. He looks down at her, the controlled, threatening expression back as his lip curls back in a sneer, his voice low and menacing:

"Who the bloody hell do you think you are?"

He raises his fist and pure terror flashes through her eyes as she throws her hands up to protect her face. All of a sudden, the pain and the fright and the anger build up in my throat as he draws back his fist.

And I scream.

I flew bolt upright in bed, breathing hard, the scream still caught in my throat. A single word kept resounding in my mind: 'Coward', 'Coward', 'Coward'…

As almost always happened with me, my head hit the solid wood of the bunk above, the sharp stinging starting up and I swore under my breath. There was a second or two of total disorientation – I had absolutely no clue where I was – but then I saw Alby's face, hanging upside down in the air from the bunk above.

  
  


"Bloody hell!" I slammed back into the pillows with a hushed yell, "Don't do that – ya' scared the undies off me!"

Alby would usually have made some smart-ass comment, but honestly, he seemed to be half-asleep, so he just yawned in my face.

"Ugh… Newt? You okay, man?"

"Oh…" Had I screamed out loud? I really hoped not. I didn't come here to be Daniel. "Oh, yeah – ain't nothin' – just a buggin' dream. Go back to sleep."

He didn't take much persuading and pulled his head back into his bunk. I heard him snoring a few seconds later. Lucky, I thought. Wasn't much chance of me ever going back to sleep. My eyes flicked to digital clock on the side of the room – 05:30 AM. The people at W.I.C.K.E.D had told us that all the alarms went off at six, which was ridiculous. I was still so bloody jet-lagged that I could barely keep my eyes open, but as I had absolutely no wish to slip into another dream, I forced myself to start thinking about what had happened.

After I had so brilliantly helped us locate the Canteen and rubbed it in Minho's stupidly good-looking face for a while, it was getting late, so Gally took us all to the supplies room to check our names off a list. They gave us a hygiene kit – which other than the toothbrush and flannel, I have not examined yet – though judging by Jackson's pained screech of : "Haven't these people heard of moisturiser!" at half-past ten last night, the contents are pretty basic. Then we were given dorm numbers and assigned room-mates and told to 'retreat until the breakfast bell goes off.' Which we did do – though not before Minho had swapped dorm numbers with Karly (the scary blonde girl), I noticed.

The girls… yeah. That was going to be something that I had to get used to. Ordinary people were hard enough, but girls. I had no experience. Right then, I was just keeping out of their way – Mariella Curie had freaked me out and permanently damaged my eardrums enough for me to never want a relationship. For Minho however, they were all he could talk about.

"Dude – Did you see that blonde chick? I know she's into me, her eyes never left me all the way around the canteen!"

"Maybe that's 'cause she was behind you in the dinner queue? And you stared at her chest the whole time we were eating?"

"It was fate, man! You're just jealous…"

Obviously, he thought the one girl – Karly – was the hottest thing since the Sun Flares. I didn't know him well enough (though I suspected I was going to) to know his type, but if I did, she'd be it. Confident strut, short skirt, impressive hair-cut and an apparently 'perfect' figure, she was basically the female version of him. It wasn't that I didn't like Karly – I did – but thanks to my sparkling, gentleman-like first impression, she was definitely wary and had said maximum six sentences to me since we'd got off the train.

The other girl, Lily, was from a totally different planet. Minho didn't think so much of her – he said her eyes were too far apart for her to be pretty. Personally, I didn't see it, but I guess he'd know. She'd plainly come from money – her accent would have been patronising if she hadn't been so nice after my whole I'm-in-a-bad-mood-let's-be-a-bloody-prat-to-everyone incident, and I thought Lily would be exactly the sort of person I hated. An arrogant, look-at-me, better than everyone else person, but she hadn't been. She was kind of quiet and had only spoken when she actually had something to say – but I'd only known these people a month and I'd already been labelled as a continuous talker, so she probably couldn't get a word in around my big mouth. And I'd definitely been talking too much. Minho and Alby hadn't really noticed, but I saw her eyes when I'd slipped up with the singing thing. She saw it – and she wasn't stupid enough to let it go.

I looked across the room at the other five boys sleeping in the room and studied their faces, so I'd actually remember their names this century. The little kid, Winston, had been taken off with Gally and two kids called Jeff and Chuck. Lily had worked a buggin' miracle on the kid – when I'd tried to talk to him yesterday, he looked like he was torn between screaming and biting me, but she just gave the kid a hug and he shut up. Brilliant idea – I'd have done it myself back in France if I'd thought of it. But I guess hugs had been off my agenda for a while.

The trip itself had been absolute hell – to the point where I was actually questioning my sanity. The first week was the worst. I was alone with 'Black the Prat' who I was then forced to make conversation with, and his life is about as interesting as his name. When Alby got on, everything got a bit better. He seemed like the kind of guy I'd always wished for as a kid – a big brother. He was smart, built like a truck and was probably the most sensible of all of us. He came up with better ideas in ten seconds then I came up with in ten hours – as displayed by my new low: breaking out of the carriage idea. Okay, that was mainly based on the fact I was going nuts stuck in there, but had I not got my undies in a twist and listened to his idea (stay in the carriage, we're almost there), I would not have a bruise that looks like the London Eye and an equally bruised ego. Talking of ego's, Minho's appearance two weeks later was definitely something. He earned my eternal respect through his carriage entrance – he threw open the door, stalked in and yelled, "Minho is in the building, everyone!" looked around at our expressions and went, "As you were!" , before throwing himself down in front of me and Alby. He was also built like a truck (you see why I'm feeling left out here?) and smart. He also had a natural confidence that oozed out of every pore in his body – the guy radiates confidence. Normally, I couldn't stand guys like that, but Minho was actually really funny and some of the plans he has… Well, let's just say he might be the reason I need Alby.

I was just about to reach up and wake Al anyway when the alarm clock went off, giving me a minor heart attack and I fell back off the bed, with a thump. The air immediately filled with groans, blanket rustling and Minho moaning sleepily:

"When I'm the President, mornings are freaking illegal…"

"Yeah, Good luck with that!"


	8. Strangers, Superman and Evil Schemes

**Chapter 8 – Strangers, Superman and Evil Schemes**

**Newt's P.O.V**

An hour of moaning, washing, dressing, teasing, whining, moisturizing - and in some cases, just bloody panicking – later, I found myself back in the Canteen queue lining up for what was supposed to be breakfast. Everything was a bit quieter than it had been the night before, but the atmosphere was charged with excitement – everyone was buzzing. We'd bumped back into the girls at the Canteen entrance (well, bumped – Min made us stand at the end of the corridor looking 'casual' until they arrived, to Alby's disgust), so the six of us were all squashed up together in the middle of the line, trying to guess what madness they were going to put us through next.

Lily – the brunette girl – was standing next to me, her long dark hair pulled back in a loose ponytail as she bounced up and down at my side. She was balanced unsteadily on her toes, craning her neck to try and see out of the huge bay window opposite us. I glanced down at her (and with the giraffe height I was trying to rock at the time, it was a bloody long way down), looking more closely than I had the night before. The girl was tiny – my Ma would've called her bird-boned – with sharp amber eyes that darted around the huge hall, flicking from person to person, trying to take in everything at once. Her arms were wrapped tight around her stomach and a slight frown creased her forehead. I bumped into her lightly with my shoulder:

"Hey, you that hungry?"

Lily jumped, snapping out of her daze suddenly and looked up at me with a slight smile.

"After last night? I don't think I ever want to eat again!" She glanced down at her position then and laughed. "Oh! No, I'm fine – Just a bit nervous about today, I guess…"

  
  


Then it was my turn to laugh. I pointed up the queue at Alby and Minho who were having a heated debate under their breath (I think it was over football or something) then looked very deliberately at myself.

"Excuse me, you're buggin' nervous? Have you seen those guys? I'm gonna get crushed in whatever we do today."

She smiled again and shook her head at me, "I don't think so – come on, you've gotta have at least a foot on both of them!"

"Yeah, probably, but I'm a walking stick insect – I have no strength at all. Every bloody centimetre I've got on them, they've got about five pounds on me! Plus I think that kid yesterday didbuggin' cripple me – everything hurts!"

Lily raised her eyebrows at my metaphor (William Shakespeare, eat your heart out) and nodded, in what seemed to be agreement – which I was sort of offended by (she wasn't supposed to agree with me) – but then she held out one of her own stick-thin arms with clear irritation on her face.

"Hmm, okay, but you're looking at the girl who hasn't even been outside for five years – I've got to have some kind of Vitamin D deficiency by now. We can die together!"

She tried to bump back into me with her shoulder jokingly, but it was like a pixie trying to hit a tree – she just hit my ribcage – which made her sigh noisily in mock annoyance and order me to bend down so she could do it properly. 'I know I'm a midget, but you don't have to rub it in!' I started to laugh and was about to come up with some brilliantly hilarious comeback (probably) when we reached the end of the queue.

  
  


I was instantly confused. Yesterday, everything had been laid out in huge metal bowls on a long table and – though we could've been eating shredded paper for all we knew – we could see it all, we had a screwed up idea of what it was. Today however, all that was on the table was fifteen jugs of milk and a series of brightly coloured boxes with tacky lettering splattered across them. I turned to ask Lily about it, but she'd already sorted herself out and was way ahead of me with Karly. Now don't get me wrong – I'm not stupid, I can read - but while everybody else was walking along the line, picking up the nasty packages like they knew exactly what was going on, I was staring at them trying to guess from the brand names what was supposed to be in the boxes – it was completely alien. Just when I'd decided I was going to have to resort to yesterday's plan and pick whatever was closest, the kid behind me – a short guy with dark skin and thick black hair – tapped my shoulder and pointed to a simpler box on my left.

"That one," He told me, a friendly grin on his face, "It's pretty plain, but you can add stuff if you don't like it."

"Thank you," I exhaled and moved towards the box, flashing him a grateful smile as I poured the contents of it (little beige toast flakes) into a bowl. He laughed at my obvious relief, picking up some of the boxes for himself.

"You not used to all this then?" The boy gestured down the long table. I snorted:

"Ha! Nope - I lived on buggin' oatmeal back home."

The boy's face immediately contorted into an expression of pure horror, like that was the single worst thing that could ever happen to a person.

"Oh, you poor little starving thing! How are you even alive?!"

  
  


His face was so totally aghast that I started to laugh again.

"I guess I'm tough– and it was pretty good oatmeal – Name's Newt, by the way."

I held out my hand as he tried to balance his bowl to shake it, before answering:

"You'd have to be! I'm Siggy Freud!"

"Nice to meet ya' – thanks for the help!" I called as I reached the end of the table and started to walk towards the others. He grinned back at me and yelled:

"Back at'cha – Good luck for today!"

Bloody hell, was I gonna need it.

8:30 – Lily's P.O.V

As soon as we'd all finished eating breakfast – and W.I.C.K.E.D seemed to have just given in that day and shipped in a truckload of breakfast cereals – the usual workers stalked into the Canteen and sorted us into our lines. Everyone walked in excited silence down another twenty identical corridors before being taken down in groups of four in a steel-framed lift (they'd obviously learnt from the revolving door incident). When everyone had arrived on what seemed to be the ground level we were lead to a huge set of double doors. Ava Paige – who just seemed to always be there – stepped out in front of them.

"Good morning, kids!" She paused for us all to echo her, "I'm glad you're all learning your way around and enjoyed your first evening here at W.I.C.K.E.D. I hope you're all making lots of new friends! This room behind me is the training room and although you aren't going to start your testing there today, you will all become very familiar with it. Once you all settle yourselves, the Chancellor will tell you what your initial tasks will be. After that, you will be taken in larger groups to the various activity centres –"

"Providing they don't freaking ditch us again..." Minho hissed loudly, which made Ava Paige flush and look slightly uncomfortable.

"Um, no – Well, anyway, as I was saying, you will be taken to your activity centres and expected to perform as well as you can- you all work at your own pace. However, anyone who deliberately does not perform to their best ability at this stage will receive punishment."

Punishment? What did that mean? Hushed whispering broke out, but we were all silenced by a deafening creaking noise as the double doors swung open and the W.I.C.K.E.D workers beckoned us through.

Everyone's jaw dropped. If we thought the Canteen had been impressive, this room was off the scale. It was enormous – easily forty foot up to the ceiling – and then the length of one and a half football pitches to boot.

If I said the words 'Training Centre' to you, what would you think? I'll give you a couple of seconds to think about it. Well, I can guarantee, anything you just thought – weapons, weights, knots, climbing ropes, creepy holograph images and surveillance cameras – it was all there, times a hundred. It was like a scene from one of the crazy sci-fi films my Dad used to make me watch.

  
  


And the people – the noise – there were people everywhere. There were a ton of W.I.C.K.E.D workers again, trying to line us up quietly to listen to the Chancellor, but they had to scream at the tops of their voices to even get people to look their way, over the wave of chatter that was crashing through the hall. There must have been at least three hundred people in that room, with every height, ethnicity, build, character that was humanly possible – and we all seemed to be between the ages of about five and eighteen. Weird.

The Chancellor was there again, standing on a platform with some other people in business suits and two tiny looking kids with clipboards and sharp eyes. I watched him snap his fingers at the nearest suit man, who whispered something to an attendant and pressed a huge red button set into the black steel wall. The air suddenly filled with a horrible screeching sound, like nails scraping down a chalkboard and everyone's hands flew to their ears in a vain effort to protect themselves from the pain. The Chancellor just stood there, watching us all yelp and writhe around for a while, a distressed expression painted on his kind-looking face, before he finally snapped his fingers again and the horrendous noise cut out.

It took a couple of seconds for everyone to stop reeling and to pull their hands away from their ears, so the Chancellor immediately jumped in with a smiling welcome.

"Good morning, children! I am incredibly sorry we had to resort to that particular measure of noise control – it was the only option you left us. Do not worry – the ringing sound you can all hear will wear off in a couple of minutes! It shouldn't affect your performance today. Now, you are an intelligent group, so I am sure you have realised that all of you that are being considered to participate in the Trials are in this room now. The final number that will actively take part will be about one-hundred-and-twenty; so the rest of you will be Cut at various stages in the process leading up to the Trials themselves."

He said 'Cut' like it was capitalised. Karly shot me a worried look and I saw Newt lean forward to whisper something in Alby's ear. Minho and Gally's eyes were still fixed on the Chancellor, waiting for him to explain. He didn't.

"But none of you need to worry about that at the moment. Today is a day that is all about you! Celebrate; show off your prowess, all of your incredible talents-"

Newt caught my eye and mouthed: 'What incredible talents?' I rolled my eyes, shaking my head at him. Pessimist.

"-all of the aptitude and ability we will come to expect from each and every one of you across the next year or so. This opportunity will come in the form of a series of tasks; two of which will commence today. One of the tasks will not actually take place in here. You will be lead outside to our state-of-the-art running track-"

Minho and a handful of others groaned.

"- where you will complete the set course in fifteen minutes if possible. The second task will be to strategically battle one of our meticulously constructed automatons. You will be issued with a name badge in order to be individually scored in both of these tasks and as your guides should have already informed you, slacking will not be tolerated. Anyone who does not wish to take part in the process may leave through the doors behind you – anyone who leaves will not be granted re-admittance and will be dealt with accordingly. Good luck everyone – lunch is at 2:15!"

The Chancellor then turned and left the stage, taking the businesspeople and the two children with him. Then, as always seemed to happen whenever someone left a stage, two doors opened on different sides of the room. The first had sunlight streaming through it, raising the temperature in the crowded room immediately. The second lay behind us and the W.I.C.K.E.D workers standing there with clipboards and eagle stares waiting for anyone to 'wimp out' and be 'dealt with accordingly'. There were some wistful glances at the doors as a platform that looked a little like a boxing ring rose up to the left of the crowd, whirring and clanking, but nobody moved towards them. I was impressed and frightened – not getting Cut was going to be harder than I thought.

"All subjects numbers 1-25! I repeat, all subject numbers 1-25! Get over here!" A man with one of the biggest mouths I've ever seen was standing at the edge of the running track outside, red faced, yelling at the top of his voice and blowing a silver whistle around his neck at three second intervals.

"He's enjoying that way too much…" The boy behind me laughed, "I think we're in this for the long haul, people.”

"Mr Clinton!" Fish-Mouth shouted at him, "Put a sock in it – save your energy for the track!"

The boy coloured slightly and some of his friends sniggered as the man carried on screaming at some people trailing behind at the backs of the lines.

"We're all going to be Cranks by the time you lot get here – move it! Well, it's about time, isn't it? No mollycoddling around here. Now you've all got here before I've been fossilised, welcome to your first task; I am Mr Mathewson and I will be your assessor! You see this path?"

He pointed at a smooth track that twisted up into what appeared to be woodland (it had to be fake – there were almost no forests after the Sun Flares) and everyone turned their eyes to it, nodding. Ugh, I thought, it has an uphill slope…

"That, boys and girls, is your task. Get back here in fifteen minutes and you will receive at least 80 out of a possible 100 points! Any further points will be added depending on how close to death you are at the end! Now, does everybody understand or am I going to have to repeat myself?"

Everyone nodded again, some people muttered "Sure". The enthusiasm levels were down a bit now – some people, like Harriet, were bouncing up and down on the tips of their trainers, raring to sprint off, others looked bored and indifferent, their faces blank. And then there were the people like me, who just had pure liquid horror shining in their eyes. Forget close to dead, I was going to be dust on the floor…

He held up a large air-horn with the words W.I.C.K.E.D painted across it.

"ON YOUR MARKS, SUBJECTS! GET SET! GO!"

Bang! We all took off, thundering down the dust track in a way that was absolutely mental. There could have been a massive cliff around that bend and nobody would have a clue, we'd all just fall off like suicidal sheep. Not that I was ever going to make it there, though – we'd only gone a hundred metres, lagging quite close to the back, when my lungs set on fire. I leaned across and whispered to Karly through breaths:

"Do you – think - there are – minus points?"

She didn't look much better; her tanned face was flushed already, her blonde and navy hair falling out of its intricate plait. She grinned though.

"Heck, yeah – I'll race you to 'em!"

I snorted before wincing and wishing I'd saved the breath. People on television made this look so easy! I tried to turn my mind away from my embarrassing inability to run more than two hundred metres without collapsing, and looked around. We were in about the middle of the pack, keeping a mile behind the human cheetahs, but there was a cluster of smaller children and clumsier people stumbling desperately along behind us, so I figured it could have been worse.

The woodland was becoming more obviously fake the longer we went on. If you concentrated hard enough (and believe me I was bored enough to) you could see that every fifth tree had a small white flower at its base with a bee buzzing around it and an identical branch sticking out – it was totally computer generated. For some reason, that really irritated me. If they wanted to measure our brains as people living in real cities then they could at least tell it like it is! I was just about to elbow Karly, to point this out to her silently – relying on crazy hand gestures – when she grabbed my arm, digging her red painted nails into my skin and dragging me back to a slower jog.

"I – am not – doing this." She gasped, "I don't care – if we fail – I'm literally - about to die!"

Although that was pretty much exactly what had just gone through my mind, I shook my head at her slightly and tried to pull her along with me.

"Come on, it can't be that much further – you saw the people in there – we need to finish!"

She shook her head right back, strands of hair flying around like loose threads.

"Don't care."

"I need you to finish."

"Nope – still don't care."

"We might get Cut!"

"We won't."

"Fish-mouth guy could kill us."

"I don't care!"

"The boys are beating us, Karl…"

Silence. She closed her mouth and peered down the track, frowning. When she looked back, there was a flash of challenge in her eyes.

"Hmm… No way! That jerk of a Korean guy would never let it go…" Karly spun away from me and took off up the track with a renewed energy, the idea of Minho beating her by half a mile spurring her on. I sighed and raced after her, trying not to trip over the computer simulated stones as I went.

"Hey - Wait for me, you ditcher!"

Just as I caught up with her, even more out of breath than I had been before the 'Road Runner' stunt, I heard a soft chuckle in my ear and a boy's voice laugh:

"That has got to be the buggin' girliest run I've ever seen."

  
  


I looked up to see Newt jogging beside us, his dark blond hair falling in his eyes as he jumped over the twisted identical vines on the path. He did it so easily, his breathing even and his words relaxed, that I would have been impressed if I hadn't been so offended.

"Shut up!" I reached across and shoved him, grinning when he tripped and stumbled a few steps. "And if you're so good, Usain Bolt, what're you doing back here?"

He snorted at my insult before waving at Karly, who was doing her usual man-scan, looking him up and down. She nodded and said: "Mm, get a grip Newton - I thought you could run way faster than freaking Superman up there!"

Following Karly's accusing finger, I could just about make out the hunched shapes of Minho and Alby through the dust haze being kicked up. Newt just gave Karly his typical lopsided grin and told her:

"Yeah, I could."

He wasn't boasting – it was a statement. He gestured up to where the buildings were coming back into sight again. "Thought I'd save my energy, rather than tearin' off like a full-gone Crank. I know how to bloody run, but I haven't got a buggin' clue how to fight an automaton-whatsit. I'm savin' my smarts."

Newt gave us a sidelong glance and took in our dishevelled appearances.

"Plus, it makes you pair look less pathetic if I run with you."

His eyes glittered with amusement as we gasped in anger, and he sprinted off, dodging people to avoid getting sliced by Karly's razor sharp nails. We watched his feeble attempt to escape and immediately ran after him, half furious, half laughing, jumping the vines and kicking stones until we heard a deafening whistle in our ears.

"AHH!" I jumped a foot in the air as Mr Mathewson appeared next to us, a stopwatch in his pudgy hand. I gasped again in surprise, as I realised we were back at the beginning of the track. Mr Mathewson begrudgingly gave us a half-hearted smile and held up the watch an inch from my face.

"14 minutes 59 seconds! Cutting it a bit close there, ladies. Nevertheless, well done – good luck in your next task. Your scores are 81 and 81."

"YES! I knew we could do it!" Karly grabbed my hands and squealed happily, seemingly forgetting that she'd declared her death just five minutes ago. I squealed with her jumping up and down, until I caught sight of Newt over Karly's shoulder. He was standing a couple of feet away with Alby, a smug grin plastered across his face. Oh… It dawned on me.

"So did he."

Karl turned to see who I was looking at and slowly got it too. She stalked over to him, wagging her finger disapprovingly.

"You evil genius, Newton!"

He started to laugh then and raised his hands in surrender, his eyes a light copper colour.

"Well, what can I say?"

I slapped his hand in a triumphant high-five, before turning to ask,

"Where's Minho?" Alby snorted and jerked his thumb over his shoulder.

Looking over at the rest of the subjects, about five had escaped with their normal appearances – the rest were in different stages of exhaustion, leaning on each other, sat on the floor guzzling water at a hundred miles an hour or leaning over with hands on knees, desperately trying to regain the air they'd lost whilst violently swearing under their breath – and those were the ones who'd got back. Minho, however, was lying spread-eagled on the grass at the side of the running track, moaning with his hands over his eyes.

"Oh." We walked across to him and Karly threw herself down on the grass with a bright smile, peeling his muscled arms away from his face. He groaned at us.

"Just kill me now…"

Alby reached down and pulled him up off the floor, handing him a water bottle, whilst Karly sang:

"Not a chance. Come on Superman, let's go fight some robots!"


	9. Agony, Automatons and Really Irish Accents

**Chapter 9 – Agony, Automatons and Really Irish Accents**

When Mr Mathewson had screamed some more at the subjects who'd passed out and had got us all moving again, we started to trek back towards the central building.

"Appalling job, the lot of you! I'm fascinated – how hard do you kids have to try to be this useless?"

The boy next to me grinned. He was short with close cut black hair and bright eyes – his name badge read 'Clint' - one of the boys who had finished last. He leaned over and whispered:

"I'm actually brilliant at being useless – I have it at an art form. It's literally exhausting being this pathetic."

  
  


I laughed behind my hand but Mr Mathewson's head snapped round and he yelled:

"I'm not going to tell you again, Clinton! Shut your mouth – this is a training regime not a slumber party!"

Clint nodded and apologised, but as soon as the assessor turned his back, he rolled his eyes, making a big show of closing his mouth and zipping it shut. Despite Mathewson's violent threats, everyone trudged down the hill, chattering noisily until the group that was swapping activities with us came up the path. I stepped forwards to call out to Dmitri, who had been sorted into that set, when I suddenly saw the state they were in. The others saw it too and the chattering stopped dead.

"Bloody Hell…" Newt breathed.

"Gordon Bennett – You can say that again!" Clint gave a low whistle, his grey eyes widening in surprise.

After the race, our team was not in the best of conditions but compared to Group 2, we looked like we'd just spent the week at a health spa. Some of the older boys – Nick and Borro – looked unhurt but the rest were a muddle of bandages, bruises and (in some cases) blood. Two bandaged girls were holding up a boy with a black eye, Dmitri was supporting Jeff (who was limping) and – when I looked closer – it seemed like almost half the group was missing. Alby broke the silence as they passed us, yelling out to the boys at the back.

"Hey Borro! Where's the rest of your team?" The lanky Scottish boy didn't even turn around, just called back over his shoulder:

"In the Infirmary!"

As soon as Group 2 was out of sight, the air erupted into terrified gibbering, the panicked looks that had disappeared from our faces making a speedy comeback. What the heck is the next task? Mathewson had obviously anticipated this because his face didn't even flicker at the mayhem. All he did was pick up a megaphone he'd pulled from somewhere and shout:

"OKAY SUBJECTS! STOP GAWKING AT THE MISFIT TOYS! You know why they look like that?!" Nobody answered. "Because they failed! They were pathetic and they failed! And unless you all want a trip to the Infirmary and a zero score, you need to stop crying for your Mommies and man-up, 'cause you're heading the same way after your last shameful performance! NOW, COME ON – MOVE IT!"

  
  


Reassuring… Most of the group looked pretty irritated by this rant and I heard Minho crack his knuckles behind me as we carried on jogging, his exhaustion gone.

"Forget freaking machines, if that guy opens his mouth one more time, I swear I'm gonna smash it in!"

It was one o'clock when we all re-grouped inside the training room for the second task. To everyone's relief, Mathewson had marched back up to the running track to deafen Group 2 and we had been left in the hands of Ava Paige. She was standing in front of the steel platform with the three black columns that had risen out of the ground this morning and held a small remote control with the numbers 1-3 across it.

"Hi, kids! Congratulations on your first task – I didn't expect so many of you to be here for the second one!" Ava gave a light laugh and looked at us to echo her. Nobody did. "Well, as you might have guessed from your meeting with Group 2, the second task will test your combat skills. Behind me there are three pillars – each one contains a different fighting machine. I promise you, they were all programmed to beginner levels and the machine you are assigned will depend on your age, height and build-"

I looked sideways at Newt and raised an eyebrow. He shook his head and mouthed, 'I have no chance…" drawing a hand across his throat with a worried expression.

  
  


"- you have three minutes and will score seven marks for every hit you land on the machine. Your turn is automatically over when you fall or surrender. Be aware that the automatons have motion sensors and will be aiming for you. The people you can see around the room will be watching your fighting style to determine your classes and trainers –"

There were two W.I.C.K.E.D workers positioned at each corner of the platform, all wearing white coats and tight lipped smiles. Next to Ava though, were two kids – older than Winston but younger than Gally – a boy and a girl. The boy looked at us warily from under a floppy brown fringe, his fingers clutching a silver clipboard but the dark-haired girl stood tall, staring openly at the group, her ice-blue eyes sizing us up, deciding what we were made of.

"- These two are Thomas and Teresa. They will become familiar and will get to know each one of you very well indeed over the next few years – the reason for their isolation from you will also become obvious during that time. They too will be analysing your performances today, as a mental challenge. Now!"

Ava clapped her hands together, "I wish I could tell you more but we need to see some impulsiveness in our Final Trial Subjects, so we need you all to display independence. Good Luck – The Challenge begins now!"

Ava Paige placed her hands on Thomas and Teresa's shoulders and led them away from the platform but their eyes never left us, even as they took their seats about ten metres away. A man's voice – deep and sharp – rang out from the speakers on the walls.

"Subject B3 – Harriet Beecher-Stowe."

Everyone's heads turned towards the tall, curly-haired girl standing at the edge of the crowd. She didn't look frightened – which was a miracle – but determination was painted across her face. The closest W.I.C. worker smiled, beckoning her onto the platform as Thomas stretched up to Ava Paige and whispered something in her ear. She nodded at him and pressed the final button on her remote.

"Advanced Level selected. Challenge commencing in Three – Two – One."

The air immediately filled with a creaking, whirring sound, metal on metal, as the second column rotated upwards. Harriet looked slightly worried now, balling her fists and rocking back and forth on her toes. Finally, after what seemed like a lifetime, a gap appeared in the pillar, widening with every rotation until something stepped out. When Ava Paige said 'machine', my first thought had been 'WALL-E' (you know – that ancient Disney film with the sweet robot?). Yep – it was nothing like that.

The automaton looked like a shopping mall mannequin but made out of titanium rather than plastic. It had a face. The second I saw it, I knew it was going to play a starring role in every nightmare I was going to have for the next five years. The bulletproof face was expressionless, its eyes black as coal with motion sensors flashing red behind them. From the neck down, it consisted of steel framing and plates, fused together but little metal spikes and studs stuck out along the arms at three centimetre intervals, glinting under the glaring lights of the training hall. Its hands were modelled on a human, with curved fingers and thumbs, but its nails were those of a catwalk model – long and sharp and deadly to anyone within a five metre radius. It didn't have legs – just a silver metal block that kept the thing hovering about ten centimetres off the platform.

  
  


Wow. Dad would love this, I thought, and he'd be able to tell me exactly where its weaknesses, blind spots and malfunctioning points are in maximum twenty seconds. He'd always been fascinated with how anything worked, but machines were his favourite. When I was little, he used to take me out on FJ's Dad's tractor and we'd ride along the canal, calling out to the farm workers and the animals until the sun went in and it started to get dark. When we got home, Mom would run to the door and yell, "Where have you been, Jeremy!" but she'd always be laughing. She always knew where he was – until the day she didn't. Not for the first time in the last four years, I missed him so much that it hurt.

Harriet's brown eyes narrowed and she took a careful step back as a buzzer sounded, signalling the start of the task. The automaton lifted its metal head slowly, the motion sensors flicking from side to side to work out her location but Harriet wasted no time. She launched forwards on the balls of her feet, slamming her fist into its side – everyone cheered and a scarlet seven flickered onto the wall next to the timer. Harriet, spurred by the score, ran in again but the machine had logged her position and threw out a metal arm to stop her. She crashed into it with a gasp but, incredibly, didn't fall. Flying backwards, Harriet somehow got her feet underneath her and used the momentum she'd fallen with to propel herself forward, dodging under its arm to hit the thing in the neck. Its head snapped back but the metal nails sliced through the air in defence, slashing at her stomach. Harriet cried out in pain – it had obviously found its target - but even then she didn't give up. She jumped to avoid the spike it swiped across the floor to trip her but landed a second early and smashed her feet into it, bending the silver metal and scoring five more sevens on the board. Sonya Sarandon started jumping up and down and cheering:

"Go on Harri!" Harriet smirked but she didn't turn her head towards the sound, keeping her eyes focused on the automatons, watching its titanium arms flashing through the air as she ducked and weaved behind it. Alby's mouth was hanging open as we watched.

"Ain't she amazing?" He said to nobody in particular. The W.I.C.K.E.D workers standing to my left seemed to agree as they scribbled notes on their clipboards.

"Her speed and strength levels are extremely impressive for someone of her age."

"Evidently. Her confidence levels are running a little too high though – she was raised in a very dangerous area of the country – I think fighting is her first instinct. She could struggle in the Sense Tests."

"Mmm, yes. We'll have to keep an eye out for that."

Nobody was surprised when Harriet reached the end of the Trial without falling and with a phenomenal score of 119. She was practically pulled off the platform by her friends who all slapped her on the back, cheering and shouting until the deep voice rang out again.

"Subject B4 – Sonya Sarandon. Intermediate Level Selected. Challenge commencing in Three – Two – One."

  
  


Sonya – who was tall, but even skinnier than I was – scrambled up onto the platform looking absolutely terrified. She glanced backwards at Harriet who smiled and gave her a thumbs up, before trying to paste a determined expression on her face. When the thing finally came at her, she ran forwards as Harriet had done but she hesitated for a second before aiming her blow. Big Mistake. The automaton located her instantly and smashed its metal spikes into her left shoulder. Sonya shrieked in pain as the spikes pierced her skin but she lashed out wildly, hitting a glancing blow to its stomach – the crimson seven flashed up on the opposite wall. She sprinted back to the edge of the ring and kicked out at the machine, her feet making contact with the things right arm.

"I think she's getting it…" Clint whispered. Unfortunately, he spoke too soon. The automaton thrust out a metal pole from the block supporting it and swept Sonya's feet out from under her. We all gasped in dismay as she fell to the ground with a surprised cry and landed hard on her wrist. The buzzer went off, meaning that her turn was up – she'd fallen. But judging by the way she was holding her arm, she couldn't have carried on anyway. Two men in white and green uniforms ran in with a medical kit and led her to the side of the room, congratulating her on her 21 point score. I looked around the room for the next person to face the machine before realising in horror –

"Subject B5 – Lilianne Pasteur. Intermediate Level Selected."

Intermediate level?! I can't even punch a butterfly! (Not that I ever would, by the way)I can't do this, I can't! My head started going into overdrive until Karly pushed me up onto the platform, squeezing my hand.

"Come on Lil – Sock it to 'em!"

Sock it to 'em? But before I could even panic long enough to ask her what to do the voice came through the speakers again.

"Challenge commencing in Three – Two – One."

Okay, Lily. Get a grip. The buzzer sounded and the automaton started to glide towards me, its spikes popping out of the metal with a whirring noise. The motion sensor fixed on me, while I stood there paralysed, and one silver arm swung out to deliver a knock-out blow. I yelled in pure panic and ducked, throwing an arm up to bash it away. The beeper sounded and I saw a seven flash up on the wall as my hand made contact with the cool metal. Yes. You can do this.

"Come on Lil!"

I didn't even know who that was as I dodged its next blow, feeling a sharp, tearing pain as the spikes cut into my cheek. I threw myself behind it, trying to anticipate its next move, but for a second it froze. What? Confusion fogged up my brain and I could hear the same echoes of bewilderment coming from the subjects. Why wasn't it beating the daylights out of me? A red light swivelled on the opposite wall and I got it- The motion sensor! It couldn't see me! If I could disable it, even for a second, I could confuse the horrible thing long enough for me to really bash it up. I tried to spin under its next stroke but it cuffed me hard across the ear, sending me stumbling towards the edge of the platform. For a second, I thought I was going to be forced to crowd-surf across the huddle of subjects below but I jolted myself away just as the people at the front started to look worried.

Argh! The violence of the move sent me careering straight back towards the thing, with no way of stopping, so I flung my arms out violently and aimed for the eyeballs. The automaton slammed into me painfully, taking my breath away, but I'd done it – I felt the smooth glass under my knuckles and I saw the red lights behind it flicker and swirl. This was the only chance I was going to get. I attacked it with all of the pent-up frustration of the last few days - This is for Mom and Dad and Winston and Dmitri and Jeff and Sonya- kicking and punching at it, spinning around in the best circle I could to keep it confused, all the while hearing the points racking up on the wall – 14,21,28,35. But I could only confuse a high-tech million dollar, top of the range, custom made automaton for so long. Just as the clock on the wall bleeped a minute left, the titanium spike swept across my knees, slicing them up and the hand smashed into my forehead sending me sprawling to the floor as the buzzer sounded.

Now, some people – like Min or Alby or Harriet – might have been disgusted with my 'average' score of 49 but inside, I was doing a happy gymnastics routine. I didn't care that I'd scored seventy points lower than Harriet – I was just ecstatic that I hadn't got knocked out or failed or died!

  
  


"Well done, Miss Pasteur." The W.I.C.K.E.D worker gave me my very own tight-lipped smile as I walked towards the platform edge, limping on air. "A cunning start."

I treated him to a full-blown smile as I sat down on the steps, trying to catch sight of Alby (who was next) to wish him luck – not that he was going to need it.

"Nice one, Lilypad." Newt reached up a hand to help me down from the platform, flashing a crooked grin. I jumped off and rolled my eyes.

"Don't even think about calling me that, Lizard Boy…" He snorted as if to say 'that's the best you could do?'

"Great job," Clint appeared next to me, dabbing at my face with a towel he'd begged off the medics, "I reckon the floor really needed that hug."

"Hey!" I growled angrily at the pair, punching Clint in the shoulder. He pulled away looking mortally wounded. "And you're going to pound yours into the ground then, Mr Clinton?"

He smirked back, "Naturally!" before grimacing and rubbing the back of his neck.

"Ach, who am I kidding? I've got a snowballs chance in the Scorch against that thing!"

Newt suddenly made a noise of frustration bringing my gaze back to him. He was looked at Clint with his brown eyes narrowed, frowning and chewing a fingernail as he did so. Clint looked puzzled and slightly worried:

"What?"

Newt sighed and stopped biting his nails, but the frown didn't disappear.

"Ugh! You've got an accent…. I should know it!"

He was right. I hadn't noticed this morning but Clint did speak with a burr that wasn't even slightly familiar to me – though it obviously was to Newt. Clint just laughed.

"So have you – you're a London lad, ain't you?"

Newt's eyes lit up like he'd just found his new best friend.

"You can tell? Nobody else has."

"Aye – sure I can. My Pa spent twenty years there as a lad! He said you never forget the way you all talk!"

Now it was Newt's turn to laugh: "And what's that bloody supposed to mean? I've got it anyway, you're Irish!"

"Sure – Dublin, you ever been?"

"No. I love the music though – my Ma knew every folk song going!"

"Ach, you should've heard my Pa's violin – he could wake the whole town in half an hour!"

Just then Minho walked up behind them and rolled his eyes at me, circling his finger next to his head and pointing at the other two.

"Okaaay, now you pair have finished being freaking geography nerds, take a look up there."

Minho slung his arms around the necks of the other boys (impressive, considering the height difference) and pointed up at the stage where Alby was stepping down, a towel around his neck.

"You're up, N."

"Oh, bloody hell…" Newt groaned and stepped out of Minho's headlock as the words "Subject A5 – Isaac Newton. Advanced Level Selected" echoed around the hall. Just before he climbed the platform steps, Newt looked back at us with a mocking grin.

"Well, it's been nice knowin' you all! Thanks for being my friends."

5:00 PM

In the end, it was Alby who won the day, with his killer score of 175. His fighting style was one that nobody else dared to try and it paid off. Rather than wasting his energy and entertaining motion sensors, he just stayed stock still, like a rooted tree and just punched the thing, over and over and over again, ducking occasionally when the spikes came his way, but he just kept going like that for the whole three minutes. The W.I.C.K.E.D workers behind us were very impressed.

"Interesting – he isn't at all intimidated by it, is he?"

  
  


"No. And surprisingly, it has no connection to his life whatsoever. Make sure you put it on file and list him – Alby Einstein. A4"

When his score came up on the wall, everybody cheered and tried to slap him on the back – even Min, though he was a bit of a sore loser. Minho's style was sort of similar – it was all offence, no defence. He just threw himself around, backwards, forwards, sideways, kicking and punching as he went, spinning around the machine until everyone watching felt dizzy. He looked like a full-gone Crank but whatever his medal-winning Dad had taught him worked. His score was an impressive 147.

Newt on the other hand, had a totally different approach to everybody else. Rather than going for the automaton, his method was all evasion. He dodged and jumped, bending over backwards at times to avoid the swinging arms, each time he ducked he hit the floor twice as fast as the others had. Like Alby, Newt had the motion sensor figured out too and kept behind it when he aimed, knocking its head forward every time. But although he lasted the full three minutes, his defence method meant his score was only 77 – judging by the massive grin on his face when he jumped back down though, he wasn't exactly disappointed. And neither were the W.I.C.K.E.D workers.

"Wow – Remarkable. That kid's fast."

"Mmm, yes . He knows it too – particularly with a height like that, it's his only advantage. He has no upper-body strength at all."

"Powerful legs though."

"Well, yes - very actually. But that's understandable with his background."

"His right ankle's weak – but that's background again isn't it?"

"Yes. List him too – Isaac Newton. A5"

Clint had done all right – 63 marks, and Karly had been thrilled with a 56. The only real disaster was Gally, who just stood there like a rabbit in the headlights until the machine punched him in the head. He left on a stretcher. So, we'd escaped less damaged than Group 2, but its safe to say that, as we walked back to the common room, everyone was exhausted.

Alby took on the fatherly role as we slogged down the actually very pretty track, everyone leaning on each other.

"Well done today guys – we've shown them we ain't a bunch of sissies. Everyone was brilliant – we've just got to keep that up for a while, okay?"

Minho slung an arm around Alby's shoulders with a teasing smirk: "Actually, I think I was spectacular today. I mean, brilliant doesn't quite cover it – "

He broke off as Alby swatted him around the head and Newt shoved him with a grin: "Pompous prat."

We'd only gone a few more yards when the trees opened up into a clearing and we could see a gorgeous lake, with flowers and birds resting on the surface and water that was way too blue to actually be real (but in my exhausted state of mind, I was prepared to let it go).

"Woah." Karly breathed and I was about to agree with her when I noticed she wasn't looking at the lake – she was looking above it. I followed her gaze and nearly screamed – suspended above the lake were two ropes, one above the other, and picking their way across it was what looked like Group 7. Every couple of seconds, someone would lose their balance and dive off into the waters below.

"That looks horrible" She shuddered. "I hate water – it messes up my highlights."

Alby nodded. "I think that's us on Thursday – it tests our balance and swimming ability."

"Ah, that's a piece of Canteen pie!" Minho bragged as we started walk again. He sprang up onto the railing and spread his arms, making his way down it, one foot after the other. "I have perfect balance."

Just then, one of the, uh, heavier subjects on the rope decided they'd had enough and cannonballed into the lake below, making a noise that sounded like a bomb going off – we all jumped a foot in the air. A loud thump sounded next to Alby. Minho was sprawled on the grass rubbing his head, wearing the expression of an irritated child. Alby – being the nice guy he was – pressed his lips together in an effort to hide his smile:

"Uh, what was that about 'perfect balance', Min?"

To Minho's disgust, everyone started to laugh, clinging on to each other and wishing we had a video camera. Of course, it was only made more hilarious by Min's cries of "It isn't funny! It isn't!"

Suddenly, Newt grabbed hold of my shoulder, pulling me down and I looked across. He was doubled over, his head thrown back and was making one of the strangest noises I've ever heard. It was a frightening mix of gasping, wheezing and screeching all at the same time. Pure horror crossed Clint's son-of-a-medic face and he ran across to Newt, already talking at a million miles an hour:

"Okay people, back up, back up – give the guy some space! He's choking! Ach, I know how to do this!" He said, wringing his hands, "I know I do! You have to clear the airways, so I have to stand behind him and then you have to-"

He broke off as the noise changed and Newt started wildly waving his arms in Clint's face.

"I'm not –I – I'm not bloody –ch-choking!" He spluttered, "Stop-Stop! I'm – I'm laughing, you lovin' blockheads! Back up yourself – I'm okay!"

Everyone stopped moving and looked at him. I pulled him up off the grass and shook my head:

"You crazy Crank, you - He was about to do the Heimlich manoeuvre!"

"I know!"

Karly snorted then and punched him in the arm. "Man, there is something seriously wrong with you Newton. Seriously. That was like some kind of dying cow noise."

He straightened himself up and grinned again – It was obviously a trait he knew well and was willing to make fun of:

"Dying cow noise' -Well, I don't know about all of you lot - I know I never finished school, but I reckon I missed the how-to-laugh part of primary!"

Everybody smiled again as we finally reached the doors of the common room, weak with laughter, hunger and exhaustion and Newt slapped Clint on the back:

"I'm sorry I gave ya a buggin' heart-attack, man. I guess we're all just a little bit weird."

"Whoa, that's okay" Clint grinned "I can do weird. Just never do that in the middle of the night!"


	10. Injuries, Insults and Mysterious Pasts

**Chapter 10 – Injuries, Insults and Mysterious Pasts**

The Canteen had been strangely empty that night – at least a third of the subjects were in the Infirmary thanks to the second task, and most of the other groups had got back long before us and had gone to bed. Normally the silence would have been unnerving but there was a friendliness about the quiet that relaxed me – besides, nobody could keep their eyes open long enough to ask for the salt let alone have an actual conversation.

I vaguely remember Karly trying to talk to me about the boys as Harriet wandered around the dorm, flicking off lights but I don't think I actually answered her before my eyes slid shut and the world went dark.

2:00 AM

The next thing I remember is being shaken awake by a pink dressing-gowned figure that was bouncing up and down with excitement, whispering my name impatiently. Ugh… My eyes flicked across to the alarm clock on the dresser: 2:00 AM. Yippee.

"Mmm…Karl? What are you-" The figure reached out and pressed a manicured finger to my lips.

"Shhh, Lily! Get up!"

It was almost pitch dark inside the dorm – the only light was coming in from under the door – and up until then, the only sound had been the steady shallow breathing of the ten other girls in the room. Now, I could hear the low hum of voices and shuffling feet outside. Frowning in confusion, I pushed myself up onto my elbows.

"Why? What's going on?"

Instead of answering me, Karly just snorted and dragged me out of the warmth of the bed, tossing my dressing gown and shoes at me as she ran towards the door. I hissed as the freezing wave of cold air hit me and hurriedly pulled on the gown while Karly beckoned wildly from the doorway.

"Hurry up! Quickly!"

I don't know why I went with her – probably something to do with the fact that only half of my brain was actually awake – but, yanking on my shoes, I hopped to the door and gave her my best 'this-better-be-good' face. Karly just rolled her eyes and laughed again, throwing a last cautious look at the others in the dorm, all fast asleep under the blankets, and pushed the wooden door open wide. I tilted my head back in frustration and sighed, but - not wanting to leave her to be arrested alone by the W.I.C.K.E.D workers that wandered the halls- I didn't exactly have any choice but to follow her.

"Oooh…" It was even colder in the corridor than it was in the room and blindingly bright – it took a couple of seconds for the burning light behind my eyes to dim enough for me to actually see. When I eventually did stop blinking like a sleepy rabbit in the headlights, the blurry figures of Minho, Clint and Newt flickered into shape, leaning back on the cream wall of the corridor. Well, I should have guessed. All three were in the regulation white pyjamas – Clint and Newt looked as tired as I felt - but Minho was wearing a dangerous smirk that the whole camp came to fear deeply and carrying a suspicious looking plastic bag. I raised my eyebrows at them, grumpy and unimpressed.

  
  


"Seriously, guys? What is this?" I marched over and examined the contents of the bag, "And where did you get three rolls of plastic wrap?!"

Clint snorted and shrugged his shoulders, whispering irritably: "Honestly, he's had me up for half an hour and I still want to know the answer to that…"

Minho just grinned round at us and said, "Patience, children. I am showing you boring townies how to live a little!"

"Maybe I don't want to live," Newt grumbled, rubbing his eyes. "I want to buggin' sleep."

"You can't sleep if you're not freaking alive, Newton. Come on."

Karly walked over to Minho and shoved him, hands on her hips. "Okay then, Superman. I wanna live. How exactly are you planning on doing this?"

"Aha!" The glint was back in the Korean boy's eyes. "That, Barbie, is what you are about to find out…"

He let that hang there ominously for a second, before running to the back and herding the four of us up the empty corridor like cattle, the creepy grin never leaving his face. Everyone groaned but we didn't exactly have the energy to protest, so let ourselves be herded past four silent dorm rooms, empty offices and common rooms until finally screeching to a stop at a darkened dead end. This corridor was different to the others, dim with metal strips across the walls and what looked like a manhole on the navy blue ceiling. Minho immediately strode forwards, twisting the dial under the manhole with one hand and holding onto the metal ladder he'd climbed with the other. I exchanged glances with Karly, confused. What the heck is he doing? With a loud creak that made me wince, Min threw open the hatch and swung himself up through the opening, before turning back and beckoning to us.

"Come on, townies! Up the ladder."

Newt was biting his nails again with a reluctant expression on his face.

"We're gonna be in so much trouble."

"Is he even for real?" Karly dragged her fingers through her tangled blonde hair, raising a sceptical eyebrow at the hole in the ceiling. Clint snorted.

"He's a sure nutter is what he is…"

"Hey!" Minho's upside-down face appeared in the gap again, "He can hear you and we're only gonna get caught if you lot carry on standing there wimping around! Come on!"

That was it for Karl; no one calls her a Barbie and a wimp and gets away with it – and particularly not Minho. She had climbed the ladder and jumped through the manhole before Minho had even finished his sentence. Clint groaned in disbelief but, with a final look back to check we were still alone, followed her. Newt glanced at me, still unsure:

"You going?"

I nodded, grabbing his arm to drag him with me. "And I'll live to regret it…"

The roof. We were on the roof.

I was just about to start screaming and ask Minho 'WAS HE ACTUALLY TRYING TO GET US ALL KILLED BEFORE WE COULD GET CUT?' when I caught sight of the skyline. The night was pitch dark, so the town about thirty miles away stood out like a beacon against the black of the night. Hundreds of lights in white, gold and blue shone out like tiny pinpricks in the gloom, the tall silhouettes of five skyscrapers that had somehow remained standing and the quiet hum of a highway somewhere in the distance. The W.I.C.K.E.D roofs seemed to go on for miles, the silver sheets of metal stretching out across the whole campus. It was beautiful.

I heard Newt exhale as he saw it too, but watching him trying to push himself up out of the manhole flashed me back to the current situation. Minho, Karly and Clint were all standing at the edge of the roof crowded around the plastic bag and waiting for us to catch up. I couldn't even see their faces in the shadows.

  
  


"Where's Alby?" I asked, pulling Newt up out of the hole and closing the cover behind him. The blond boy snorted as we joined the others at the edge.

"Where d'ya think? He's the only one not bloody stupid enough to be on a roof at 2 AM."

Minho sighed when we reached him, unimpressed with our enthusiasm levels.

"Honestly, you'd think I asked you to watch freaking paint dry! This is gonna be the best experience of your sorry lives!" He spread his hands wide, looking around at each of our faces to make sure we were listening. "Now, here's the thing. Okay, you know that kid in Group 4? Franklin or whatever his name is? Basically he really ticked me off yesterday, but –"

"Why?" Clint interrupted.

Minho suddenly looked embarrassed by whatever the memory was. "Uhh, not important… Anyway, I heard him say at lunch that he'd noticed the Crank Alarms we've all got in our rooms and how freaking creepy it was, like how 'scary' it would be if they ever went off…"

"We are not setting off a buggin' Crank Alarm on our second day!" Newt protested but Minho threw out a hand to shut him up.

"No we are not, Mr Newton, I'm glad you were paying attention. What we are actually going to do is so much better than that. That's where you guys and all this stuff-" He pointed down at the plastic bag. "comes in."

  
  


Minho sat down on the floor and began to spread out the contents of the bag. A buzzer, two orange walkie-talkies, string, three rolls of plastic wrap, something that looked suspiciously like pink Canteen gloop, a paintbrush, two mega-rolls of dissolvable duct-tape and the nail scissors from someone's bathroom set. What? I wrinkled my nose in confusion but Clint obviously felt the same way.

"Where did you even get all this stuff, mate?"

Min shook his head. "Again, not important – ask a useful question, Clint. What isimportant is what we do with it. Just across these two roofs is the Group 4 boy's dorm, second window down on the left. There's a kid in there that's asthmatic, so they have to leave the window open two inches. Lil, Karly – you two are going to push one of the walkie talkies and the buzzer through the gap, using the string and the nail scissors. Then Clint is gonna plastic wrap the window – properly though, no messing around – spread the goo on it then plastic wrap it again."

"Meanwhile, me and N are gonna go through the manhole on that roof and duct tape their door closed – and this ALL has to happen in under twenty five minutes, 'cause that's how long it is between the security camera checks. I, being the master of all things evil, have programmed the flashing buzzer to go off at precisely 6:00 AM, and naturally the idiots will think it's the alarm. Then, I'll use the walkie-talkie to make general zombie noises at them and when they try to get out, the duct tape'll jam the door – it'll be hilarious! And don't worry, townies, they'll all be fine – the tape dissolves five hours after you use it, so it'll disappear by 7:00 and I'll turn the speaker off – just in time for breakfast!"

He stopped, out of breath, a huge grin on his face, obviously pleased with his 'hilarious plan'. I had to admit it was pretty clever – maybe a bit wicked, but clever all the same. Karly had already picked up the nail scissors and the string – even Clint looked mildly impressed.

"Ach, my brother did that to me back home before the Flares – It was legendary! Sure, I hated him for a couple of days, but he filmed it and played it back the next week and I died laughing with the rest of 'em. All right, Park – as long as that tape is dissolvable, I'm in."

Minho's grin got wider as he looked at me and Newt for confirmation. We nodded and he tossed the equipment at us, standing up.

"We're heading there – two roofs down!" He pointed across; checking we all knew where he meant. "Okay, team – move out!"

We took off, running across the roof, trying not to make too much noise above the offices – by this time all of the 'townies' were spluttering with laughter at the sheer wildness of what we were doing. If you had told me a month before, that one day I'd be running across a steel roof in the middle of nowhere with a 'popular girl', the son of a martial arts medallist, a mysterious Brit and an Irish medic to play a trick on a bunch of 'highly-intelligent' boys, I would have had a laughing fit. Little did I know that wasn't anything like the weirdest thing I would end up doing with those people…

  
  


"This is nuts!" Newt yelled from behind me, trying to blow his hair out of his eyes as he ran. "There is no lovin' way this is ever going to work!"

I leapt across a series of manholes and ridges before yelling back. "Pessimist! We're supposed to be 'living', remember? 'S more than I ever have!"

I looked over my shoulder and saw his eyes flick around him, at me, at the skyline, at the others running on ahead, vaulting fences and dodging windows and his easy grin appeared on his face.

"Not being a show off or anything, but I've done this whole Roof-Runner thing before – it's overrated!"

"Oh yeah, Indiana Jones?!" The wind ripped the words from my mouth so quickly, I wasn't sure he'd even heard them.

"Yeah, I actually did it on New – Ah!"

A sudden crash sounded and he broke off with a yell of pain. I skidded to a halt, spinning around. He was bent double, one hand clutching his ankle, the other resting on his forehead, his brown eyes screwed up in agony as I sprinted back to him, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Min! We've got a problem!" I whisper-yelled up to the Korean boy at the front of the line, before turning back to Newt. "What is it? What have you done?"

Newt groaned and immediately tried to straighten up, shrugging off my hand. He hissed through gritted teeth.

"I'm fine. I've – ah! - I-I've done this before – I'm okay! Look!"

He swung his right foot forward, but the second he tried to put weight on it, his whole face contorted in pain and he swayed sideways, grabbing my shoulder for support. I slipped my arm around his waist (I couldn't exactly reach his shoulders) and raised an eyebrow.

"Um, sure you are. Seriously, what have you done?"

Newt growled in annoyance, but managed: "Ahh - There's a bloody metal grille back there – caught my ankle in it. I don't think I broke it, but…"

The others came up then, looking worried. Before Newt could stop him, Clint had thrown himself down onto the floor and was examining Newt's foot.

"Ach – nasty. Nope you're right, you haven't broken it, you muppet, but it's pulled at best and sprained at worst. You need to go back, mate."

"I'll take him." I looked round at them. "You guys need to stay here, finish what you started – we can't all go in now or we'll look like something out of 'The Famous Five'!"

Newt tried to protest, "Really, Lil, I'm-" I met his gaze, trying to make mine as determined as possible.

"If you say you're fine, I will push you off the roof and then you really won't be fine. You have absolutely no say in this." I threw my walkie-talkie and the string at Karly.

  
  


Minho nodded, looking almost guilty as he slapped his friend on the shoulder as gently as possible.

"Okay. You take him to the Infirmary and I'll keep the ball rolling up here. I'll come find you in the morning – try not to kill yourself on the way down, you idiot."

Half an hour, a lot of wincing, stumbling and almost falling down the manhole-ing later, we made it back down the corridor and slowly started making our way towards the Infirmary. Newt was still bright red and kicking himself every three seconds:

"Oh, for the love –I can't believe I just did that!" He laughed, screwing his eyes up again. "Ah! I'm sorry, Lil. I'm so clumsy – there is no way I'm making it to the Trials. I'll just fall off something or get eaten by something or forget something or knock over something really dangerous; it's gonna be a bloody car crash!"

I shook my head as we staggered past the final row of dorms, "Come on, Newton – if it wasn't you, it would've been me and if it hadn't been me, it would have been Clint– so I think lasting a whole fifteen minutes was pretty impressive. Plus, you saved me from doing something massively stupid, like falling through a window or something."

Newt smiled before falling silent, his forehead creased as we approached the Infirmary doors.

"Lil?"

"Yeah?"

"Remind me - what exactly did I do?"

Ugh. I forgot we needed a cover story.

"Umm…" I had absolutely no idea. "You… went to get a drink and you tripped on Alby's bedpost and fell on your ankle."

"Okay. Where's Alby? And where did you buggin' come from?"

"You didn't want to wake him. I was in the bathroom and heard the crash."

He looked at me, his brown eyes managing to shine with amusement. "That's pathetic."

"You got a better idea, genius?"

"…Ask me tomorrow and I will have."

"Didn't think so!" I sang, "Some use you are…"

"Says the girl who runs like a chicken."

"Hey!" I reached up with my free arm and cuffed him round the ear, "I could just drop you and run, you know…"

"Like you'd ever do that, Princess." He was laughing now.

"Oh, wouldn't I?" I went to fake drop him, when the double doors swung open and a pretty young W.I.C.K.E.D worker stepped out. She had dark red hair pulled back into a ponytail and the badge on her uniform read: Nurse Alcott. She looked us up and down with a smile as we frantically tried to re-arrange our faces convincingly.

"Hello, Isaac, Lilianne. What on Earth has happened to you pair?" She pulled out her electronic clipboard while Newt rattled off the lie, his brown eyes widening in pain as I pulled him towards the door again. It was not a good story. In fact, it was a ridiculously bad story but Nurse Alcott just nodded at him when he finished and directed us to a couch opposite the window.

"Okay, well you sit right there, Isaac and I'll just fill in some forms for you – it shouldn't take long." She handed him a glass of water and turned away– but as she walked to the desk, she smiled back at us and winked.

3:00 AM

Nurse Alcott came back a couple of minutes later and bandaged Newt's foot. The room was eerily silent, nobody else there but the three of us and what felt like a hundred bleeping machines.

"It's only a sprain, sweetie, you'll feel just fine in a few days! Just you watch out for those bedposts – vicious they are… Now, looking at your little faces, I would love to send you back to your rooms right now, but I need you to stay here for about an hour, Isaac – just in case you hit your head falling. Lilianne can stay here and keep you awake, all right?"

  
  


As she walked back to her station, I suddenly realising how exhausted I was and a massive yawn overtook my body. Newt immediately copied me, rubbing his eyes and muttering drily:

"Bloody Minho…"

I laughed and pulled his hands away from his eyes. "Stay awake."

"Ugh, I am." He'd grinned at first but it gradually faded and his face took on a serious – almost angry- expression as he watched the skyline – an expression I'd never seen him wear before. "This is pathetic. Look at me – this is exactly what I said I wasn't going to do when I came here – stupid, stupid, stupid."

There it was again: 'when I came here' – normally, I don't think I would ever have asked him, but I was too tired to even think about social boundaries right then.

"You keep saying that."

His head snapped round and I realised that he hadn't actually been talking to me – he hadn't really been talking to anyone.

"What?"

"'when I came here'. Like you had a choice."

"Of course I did."

I was surprised and sort of annoyed. Okay, these people weren't as bad as I'd imagined, but Black hadn't given me even the slightest hint of a choice. Why had Newt got to choose? And why the heck did he choose to come?

"They told me I didn't have one. That my Mom had signed me over."

"Yeah, well." Newt sighed and rubbed the back of his neck, "As I don't actually have parents, that's, uh, never really been an issue for me."

Oh gosh. Nice one, Lily. Sensitive. What do I say now? I couldn't pretend he hadn't said it, that would be a million times worse, but how could I ask him anything now? The silence stretched out and I decided to bite the bullet.

"Oh… you're an orphan?"

Again he frowned and kept his eyes on the skyline. "Yeah, I guess. I've got a Dad, but…"

I wanted to hug him then and slap myself. Not having Dad was the worst thing that had ever happened to me. It hurt more than anything I'd ever known. Why the heck was I asking him about it?

"Where is he?"

Newt snorted, "I don't know and I really don't care."

The pure venom in his voice surprised me – so far he'd seemed like the nice guy, the one that was sweet to everyone, friends with everyone, but maybe it was more than that. Maybe that was who he wanted me to see.

"Why aren't you with him?"

He didn't answer for a long time and the quiet was painful, choking me and I was just about to apologise when he turned his head to meet my eyes.

"Um, I was… for a long time, actually. But…" Newt tilted his head back and sighed. "My father wasn't a good man. He wasn't a bad man either, but… he just wasn't the person I want to be. I wasn't the person I want to be when I was with him."

He was twisting his fingers in his lap, his eyes fixed on the skyline again.

"He made me so angry… all the time. I couldn't get away from it, but I couldn't tell anyone, I couldn't get rid of it. It was always there, even when I thought I was happy – it was there, right under the surface... all the time. And I hated him for it… hated him for making me feel like that – this blind rage, it shadows everythingand I hated myself for feeling it. I was somebody else – I'm not like that, Lily, I'm not. I don't shout, I don't hurt people, I don't hate people, I don't lose it, it's not who I am… But it's who I was, when I was with him. And I couldn't do that. I couldn't be his bloody puppet."

Newt turned to me again, laughing softly when he saw my horrified face.

"I'm sorry… none of that made any buggin' sense did it?"

"Um… not – not really…"

He tried to move himself to the side, to see me better, but his foot caught and pain flashed across his features. Groaning in defeat, he looked across at me. "Look, do ya' mind if I..?"

"Sure. Come here."

I took his arm carefully and dragged him sideways until he was lying against me, his head against my right shoulder. "There you go. Better?"

"A lot. Thanks. No… I guess if I'm gonna tell you this, I should start from the bloody beginning."

"No, it's okay! You don't have to – I mean, I'm just really nosey- and exhausted… you don't have to tell me anything, Newt. I didn't mean it like -"

Newt smiled slightly, "Yeah, I do. I've started now – it'll keep me awake… And it was a long time ago. I'm over it. But I'm warning you, Tiger-Lily, it's not exactly a happy story…"

  
  



	11. It's Not Exactly A Happy Story

**Chapter 11 – It's Not Exactly A Happy Story**

"It was a long time ago. I'm over it. But I'm warning you, Tiger-Lily, it's not exactly a happy story…"

Newt's blond head was tilted back, resting on my shoulder as he twisted his long fingers absentmindedly, searching for the right beginning. I stole a glance at him out of the corner of my eye, but the boy's face was expressionless, totally void of his usual animated emotion. Eventually, he sighed heavily and – in a tone far quieter and more detached than I'd ever heard him use – began.

"Well… I was born in London in 2052 – you knew that. But I guess the first eight years of my life were about as perfect as any kid ever gets it. My Ma was a performer…"

His brow furrowed for a second as his brain dragged him off into some memory I couldn't see and, trying to bring him back, I asked:

"Was she good?" It worked. Newt sat up with a jolt, immediately wincing at the pain, but with his eyes shining copper.

"Of course - she was bloody brilliant! She wasn't exactly famous, but I always loved how impressed people were when I said her name – I was only six or seven but I thought the lovin' world of her. I was gonna be just like her one day… Anyway, my Pa was the CEO of a huge entertainment company based by the Thames River –'s how they met actually – and he got paid more in three months than most people got in a year. My Ma never cared about that though; she loved him – and being honest, I s'pose I did then. I took the whole thing for granted – the house, the lifestyle, the happiness – all of it. I hadn't had to work a day in my life."

"I was eight when the Sun Flares hit. Not much happened in London to start with and nobody really panicked – it was all happening in the US and in Africa. Pa reckoned the whole thing'd blow over in a year, maximum and he didn't try to move the business from the river."

Oh no… I winced. Everyone knew what happened to London.

"Bloody hell, it was the biggest mistake he ever made and he made more lovin' mistakes than there are Cranks in the Scorch. Obviously, two weeks later the bloody ice caps melted. The Thames flooded and destroyed half the city – everything from Camden to Lewisham – and that included Pa's base.

"You know, Lil, this is probably the one bit of the whole pathetic thing that I can't blame him for. When all's said 'n' done, he was bloody unlucky. It wasn't like the whole business was gone – we still had the offices in Coventry and Manchester, but who wanted a buggin' entertainment company when the world just ended?"

The boy frowned and rubbed the back of his neck, almost taking my eye out with his nails as he tried to remember exactly how it happened. Not that it mattered really – it didn't take a genius to guess the next part of the story.

"And it was the same with Ma, really. They stuck it out for another thirty days on the West End before packing it in for good. I don't remember it that clearly, but it was bloody confusing. I'd lived in a world of lovin' unicorns and happiness for most of my life – all this fear and shouting and chaos jacked my head up so far I couldn't think straight.

"Sure, we weren't poor. There was no reason for us to be buggin' bankrupt in a month, but Pa never saw it like that. In his mind, when the business fell through we were done for. Doomed. And I guess, by seein' it like that, he sorta made it the truth. We moved out of our house into a bloody awful flat in the part of London where three people get stabbed in the time it takes ya' to go to the loo and Pa started to drink what money we had left."

Newt's frown had deepened and he'd started twisting his fingers again. Already, I was beginning to get a very strange picture of his 'Pa'. My Dad's face sprung into my mind next to it – the two pictures painted in such different colours that it made my head hurt. Dad was probably the world's most optimistic optimist: if I broke a vase, he 'never liked it anyway', if I failed a test, 'well, I'd never do that again, would I?' If Mom nearly burned the house down cooking, then we'd invented a whole new shade of charcoal – 'we could make millions!' I don't think the words 'the black side' even meant anything to him.

But his father… well, I already feared him.

"It wasn't that bad to start with." Newt continued, "We muddled through like we always had, trying to smile, sticking together. They even had me convinced we'd be okay. But then – when they thought I was asleep – I started to hear their voices through the walls, shouting at each other about everything under the bloody sun: the flat, money, the business, food… me. I don't think they actually started screeching, but in my mind it got louder and louder until all I could buggin' hear was their voices, on and on, making my little head spin. In the end, I must have screamed. My Ma came running in and held me. She whispered the same bloody lies they'd whispered before, 'It'll be fine', 'We didn't mean to scare you, Danny', 'It'll be alright.' "

Danny. That must've been his name, I thought.

"It was a load of buggin' rubbish but I listened then 'cause I was a kid and I wanted it to be true. I didn't see the mark across her cheek. It took almost a year of screaming, crying, Ma hidin' her face for me to believe it. To see what he was doing to her."

Oh gosh…His voice had become distant again and he was staring out of the window at the lights in the dorm blocks. He wasn't talking to me anymore. I said nothing – what could I say to that?

  
  


"I was terrified of him, but he didn't touch me," Newt gave a short laugh, "Actually, he never bothered with me at all. Even before the Sun Flares I was a disappointment to him. Football was a bloody waste of life to me; I was awful at boxing and cricket – ha! All I ever wanted to do was go to Ma's rehearsals and get the stagehand to teach me guitar or badger her new co-star to show me his routine. I was alright at lessons but I was never the best – he didn't know why; I was his son after all and he was the buggin' child wonder at school, wasn't he? Why couldn't I be like him?

"He was that seven foot prat who ruled the roost everywhere he went, but he only got there by climbin' over everybody else and treadin' on their heads. So when the Sun Flares pulled the roost out from under him there definitely wasn't anyone there to catch him. All he had was me. The obstacle that watched him everywhere he bloody went – I think that was why he hated me in the end. He could threaten her as much as he wanted and she'd shut up. But I was always there, watching him, judging him. Still, the sorry shred of humanity that he had left kept him away from me. But that couldn't bloody last…"

Newt spat the last four words, before falling silent again. The only thing that broke the silence between us was the whirring of the logging equipment and the click-click-click of Nurse Alcott's computer. My head was spinning along with the dials in the machines, trying to process what he'd told me… I knew whatever had happened to him was on a different level to the rest of us – that some parts of it were really horrible but, this… And I got the sense he hadn't even really started yet.

"Seriously, N, you don't have to tell me…"

I pulled my knees up to my chest, jolting Newt a little and he registered my words, waking up a bit. He twisted his head round like an owl and gave me half a smile.

"No. I told ya, I want to: I'm just bloody awful with words! Min's pretty good - he wrote every rubbish chat-up line going - and Al just doesn't waste 'em. But me; I curse like a sailor then talk for England!"

  
  


We both laughed, somewhat pathetically considering how tired we were, but it was a laugh all the same. The momentary break from the misery of his story was short and soon he gingerly twisted back to the window, taking a breath to carry on.

"Anyway… like I said, it couldn't last. One day – I was nine, I think – I heard Pa shouting again. Calling her every disgusting name you can think of. She was crying and crying and something snapped in me for a second. I remember the bathroom door slamming and me running up the stairs to the landing." Newt snorted, "I think I threw a scatter cushion at him actually. And then… I don't really remember – they asked me afterwards and I didn't remember – Pa spun round and his eyes were wild. I'm not sure if he was seein' me there or what but he came charging from the room like a full-gone Crank and lashed out. He didn't hit me very hard – it was just a slap – but I wasn't expectin' it. And I was standing at the top of the stairs.

"The next thing I remember is an ambulance, lying on a bench feeling like somebody shot me. My head was pounding like a mother and, for the love, I thought they'd cut off my foot, it hurt so much. They told me I'd broken it. Pa was there, holding onto me. He was cryin' like a baby; big fat tears splashing onto my face. He just kept muttering, 'Daniel, I'm sorry… Bloody hell, I'm sorry, Daniel…" over and over. They asked me what happened and for a moment I was gonna tell them. I was gonna tell them what he was doing. But then I looked at his face and, the buggin' fool that I am, I told 'em I slipped. And he smiled at me, Lil. 'Clumsy idiot, aren't ya' Danny?' In that second I thought that maybe I'd finally done it. I'd done something right, I'd been a man rather than a guitar playing sissy – he was proud of me. We could go home and everything'd be fine because he loved us and he'd be the man I saw in my dreams rather than the alcoholic that had been my reality. In that second I believed it with every bone in my little body. That dream lasted all of the three days I was in hospital.

  
  


It was the lovin' stupidest thing I ever did. Ya' see, that day showed him that I wasn't gonna talk. He could break my bones and I wouldn't say a word. I'd given him permission to hurt me – his conscience was clear. I'm not gonna tell ya' what he did then, what happened – you're a smart kid, you can work it out – but every day of my life was hell. I spent two years taking the punches, running away from him, trying not to even breathe when I was around him – the smallest thing ya' can think of made him snap."

Newt looked up at my face then with a questioning expression. I wasn't entirely certain what my expression was at that point, but I'm betting it was somewhere between shell-shocked and horrified. He was obviously waiting for my reaction, waiting for me to say something. I shook my head and whispered:

"Why didn't you tell someone? They'd have had him arrested! – that's abuse, N, it's illegal…"

He gave me an almost pitying glance. "I know what it was. But that's why I couldn't tell – yeah, they'd have arrested him. What would me and Ma do? If they took me away then Ma'd be alone with him, and I couldn't leave her. Do ya' see?"

I saw. My heart went out to the tiny eleven-year-old in that freezing London flat with a monster of a father, crouching in corners and dodging blows. I wanted to hug him but I was pretty sure that pity was the last thing he wanted. So, I pushed back the mothering instinct and just nodded and sighed:

"Yes… What happened next?"

I didn't think it was physically possible for his expression to get any darker, but at those words his eyes seemed to shine black.

"The bloody strangest thing, Lil, is that I'm not really sure. It happened so fast – and three years ago – it's even blurrier now than it was at the time. I was sitting in my room with the door locked, playing my Ma's guitar when I heard him shouting again. I didn't do anything – it was always worse for her if I got involved – she cried when he hit me. All I did was play the guitar louder so I couldn't hear them; I tuned them out totally. But then something happened that had never happened before: I heard a crash and then the front door slammed shut, rattling the windows. I remember, I put the guitar down and walked to the door, listening for her voice, his voice, anything to warn me about what was coming – but it was silent. I'm tellin' ya', you could have heard a pin drop. In a way, that was the scariest fight 'cause I didn't know anything. I'd got so good at reading things just by their sounds, people's faces, but the whole flat might as well have been pitch black, for all I bloody knew."

I wasn't entirely certain why, but I suddenly felt a wave of unease as Newt described it. Something was wrong.

"I called her name a few times." He said, his voice dropping to a whisper. "But nobody answered – not even Pa to tell me to shut the hell up. My stomach just dropped, Lil. I hadn't even opened the door but I guess I knew it was bad. This wasn't a flare-up, flare-down thing, it was really bad. When I pushed open my door, all of the kitchen lights were on (they never were), so I ran in there – I think I was still callin' their names…"

  
  


He stopped for a second; increasing my unease by dropping his head to his chest and balling his fists until his knuckles went white. Reaching around the sofa arm, I put my hand on his shoulder.

"Newt…"

"No! – I – I've just never tried to say this before… not all the way through… No, I was callin' their names... I didn't see her at first. I was looking in all of her usual places: the armchair, the windowsill, the stove and I didn't look down. It was only when I tripped on the carpet and fell that I saw her… just lyin' on the rug like she'd fallen asleep there. I think I screamed. Her face was white… like a ghost's… her lips were blue and there were red marks on her neck, on her collarbone. I screamed and screamed at her … I was waiting for her to laugh, to tell me it was a joke, that it was okay. But she didn't. 'Cause it wasn't. He'd done it: after all those years of screaming at her, hitting her, he'd finally done it – he'd hit her and she hadn't got up.

"I felt so helpless, so bloody useless… I kept thinking: I should've told someone, I should've protected her, it should've been me, it should've been me-"

I did hug him then. He'd pulled his hands up to his face, so I couldn't see his expression. I didn't want to – I was almost crying myself. This woman he'd adored, who'd been such a star, an inspiration – both for Newt and on the stage – had been snuffed out by the kind of man I thought only lived in storybooks. It was sort of awkward in our current position, trying to hug him sideways without jolting his leg but in a weird way it worked and for a split second he surrendered, leaning his head back on my shoulder, before shrugging off my arms.

"I told ya'… it was a long time ago… My brain went into overdrive as I realised that Pa'd be home soon. And I'd be alone with him. Even now, I'm not sure what I was thinking – the only thing going through my head was that I couldn't live with him, not alone, he'd kill me or I'd kill him, I couldn't be there. So I did the only thing I could think of: I stuffed everything I could find into my rucksack, grabbed Ma's guitar and climbed out of my bedroom window."

"You ran away?!" An eleven-year-old, alone in the darkest backstreets of London? How was he even alive?

"Yeah, I did. Not sure I'd have the guts to do it now, but it worked out a whole lot better than the flat ever did. I had to grow up, I had to be tough – you were dead if you didn't show some smarts."

"What did you live on? How did you eat?"

"Well, Pa laughed at me for singin', for knowin' all of Ma's songs, but that was what saved me in the end. I could play the guitar a bit and I could sing pretty well. I trekked to the more crowded areas of the city and busked – all Ma's show songs, the songs I'd hear from other people's radios. It didn't get ya' much - £5 a day maybe, couple of chats with some old ladies - but water costs nothin' and I could live on bread and fruit for about four days at a time. S' why I made a right idiot of myself at breakfast this morning – I didn't have a clue what any of that fancy cereal was! You lot ditched me! I had to loiter there until someone showed me how it worked-"

I started to laugh, "How it worked?! It's cereal, Newton not rocket science!"

  
  


"Hey!" Newt was trying to look wounded but failed miserably as he started to splutter as well, "That milk jug had a switch and a lid and everything! Oww, stop laughing, Princess, you're shakin' me - now do ya' want to hear the rest of this or not?"

"Sorry… Carry on, N. But I'm not letting this go…"

He smiled in defeat. "Anyway, the worst things were the cops and the gangs. My Pa did look for me, but he didn't do it very hard – there were posters of me all across the lower part of London for a while. Well, there was no buggin' way I was gonna let myself be recognised. I grew my hair out past my shoulders and, 'course, I lost a ton of weight, so there was no chance Pa'd ever be sober enough to recognise me. Then again, I never took the chance. I moved every five days – I had a circuit, see – Regents Park, Drury Lane, Oxford Street, Hyde Park and a couple of others and the Police had better things to do than look for me. I had some close shaves though – I only got away once by grabbing some poor old man and pretending to be his grandson - he was so bloody surprised that he didn't deny it!

"The gangs were worse. There weren't that many that were really dangerous. Most of them were like me, a bunch of kids just tryin' to keep themselves alive. But then, they were older than me and most had nasty obsessions with knives. I got mugged about five times before I realised that they weren't fast enough to get over the roofs. I could climb up pretty much anything and then run like hell until I got to a crowded area and screamed that I was being attacked." He laughed softly, "They absolutely loathed me. I don't know why they didn't kill me in my sleep."

There was one thing that I didn't understand about this story. To get me to join them, to get Minho and Karly and Clint to join them, W.I.C.K.E.D had come to our parents – Newt didn't have any parents. More than that, he didn't even have an address. How did he end up here? Why did he want to?

"What changed?" I asked. He looked confused, not understanding the question.

"Hmm?"

"If you were so good at surviving, why did you come here? If you get Cut you can't go home. Why risk it?"

"Ah…" His eyes darkened again and he nodded. "Yeah… Ya' gotta understand, Lil, in those years, - not just on the streets, but when I lived with Pa – I couldn'tbe noticed. It never ended well. I had to make myself disappear. Not exactly an easy task – I mean, look at me…"

He twisted around and gave me a wry smile. And I suppose, in a way, that was the first time I did look at Newt. I mean, really look at him. Years later, I spent hours talking to him, listening to him, falling asleep at his side, trying to memorise every detail in his face before I lost it. But that was the first time. He wasn't exactly handsome, but with his dark eyes, fair hair and square jaw, he was certainly striking. That coupled with his distinctive accent and extensive height, he wasn't someone that was easy to forget.

"But I became brilliant at it – hiding, I mean. I became just what everyone expected to see. I was just another teenage busker: skinny, ragged, homeless from the Sun Flares – nobody looked twice. And that was fine; it was exactly how I wanted it to be – how I needed it to be.

"I guess it changed about six months ago. When I busked on Drury Lane, there was this old homeless man who used to sit outside the theatre with his dog and a plastic cup. He didn't always talk to me, but sometimes he'd call across the road, request something from 'Carousel' and toss me a 50p when I sang it or let me pet his dog. One day, I got to my spot and he wasn't there. It was just the dog sitting on the blanket howlin' fit to wake the dead. And I 's'pose it hit me then: I'd spend my whole life trying to make myself invisible, to blend in with the crowd and disappear but that day I realised something. I could die and no-one would even notice. No one would know who I was. And that terrifies me.

"So when Black cornered me in an alleyway – they'd found my Missing Person records at Scotland Yard and my sightings across London interested them. They knew how fast I had to run and what I had to do to stay ahead of the police – when Black cornered me and said I had a chance to restart, to help people and stay as far away from Pa as was humanly possible I jumped at it.

"I want to do something worthwhile, be someone worthwhile, rather than a homeless teenager that died of the Flare. Prove that I'm not 'useless' and 'weak' and 'pathetic'. Prove him wrong."

He looked at me then, his story finished, the smile gone from his face and his brown eyes serious. "D'ya know what I mean, Lil?"

"Yeah." And I think I did. I reached over and took his hand, squeezing his fingers. "We'll be something, N. I mean, how could we not be? With Minho's sarcasm, Clint's mind, Alby's body, Karly's hair, your voice and my clumsiness – the world will tremble at our feet. Obviously… Seriously though Newton – we will be. Promise."

He smiled, his eyes lighting up. "Promise."

We sat there for a long minute, just looking out at the lights of the camp and the stars that littered the sky, thinking about what our new lives held until Newt finally looked down at our hands and chuckled.

"This is lovin' ridiculous – it's like something out of Lord of The Rings! Look at us – I don't even bloody know why I'm telling you all this. Why am I telling you all this?"

He pushed himself up on an elbow, trying not to stab me in the ribs as he did. I rested my head on his shoulder and laughed.

"Oh, I don't know – you're tired, I'm tired, we're in our pyjamas on a hospital sofa and it's four AM. What else would we be doing?"

"Aha!" Newt raised an eyebrow with a grin, "You forget, Miss Pasteur, we could be on the roof pouring custard on a second story window."

"We could… we could." I went to smile at him, but a huge yawn caught me part-way through again and forced my mouth out of shape. Just like before, Newt immediately copied me. He groaned,

"Ughh – do ya' think it's been an hour yet, Lily?"

"Yeah… and if it hasn't who cares?"

He nodded and moved back to my side again, resting his head on my arm.

"G'night Lilypad…"

"Night, N."

When Nurse Alcott came back, we were fast asleep in front of the stars.


	12. Pandas, Pop Tarts and Sand-Filled Pits

**Chapter 12 – Pandas, Pop Tarts and Sand-Filled Pits**

Beep!

"The time is 6:00, subjects!"

Beep!

"Please report to the dining room in thirty minutes. I repeat, thirty minutes. Your attendance is imperative: Sub-Station One opens today."

Beep!

What? Where am I?

Suddenly, a brilliant white light filled my vision and slashed viciously through both my dream and my eyelids, forcing me to open my eyes. Through the sudden blindness and the lingering cobwebs of sleep that were still strung across my sight, I could make out two sets of bunk beds and blurry figures rushing around the room, pulling clothes out of cupboards and screeching: "WHERE IS MY EYELINER?! I SWEAR I LEFT IT HERE!" I was back in the dorm room. Weird.

Just as I was about to pull the blankets back over my head and hope that the fact that it was 6:00 and I'd got two hours sleep maximum would go away if I didn't think about it, Harriet appeared about an inch from my face and yanked the blankets off me (something she became outstandingly good at over the two years we lived there).

"Come on, everybody! UP, UP, UP! BREAKFAST IN HALF AN HOUR! UP, UP, UP GIRLS!"

A horrified moan sounded from Mariella's bunk near the door. "Ugh! Nooooo- I am going to have the worst bags under my eyes!" Her horror intensified as she stamped over to the mirror and squealed: "I LOOK LIKE A PANDA, HARRI! A BLIND PANDA!"

Even more noises of general irritation echoed around the room, everyone realising the extent of yesterday's injuries. Nobody could even try to sneak back to bed because Sonya had opened the curtains and every human on earth knows that there is no getting any sleep after that monstrosity has occurred.

With a long-suffering sigh, I got dressed and scrabbled around in my backpack for my mismatched earrings, slipped them in and retrieved Karly's eyeliner from under Erin's bed. She grabbed it with a shriek of pure joy as I started to drag her out of the door, before Harriet left us to starve in the endless maze of coral corridors.

6:30

Despite Harriet's best efforts, by the time we got down to the canteen, about two hundred other subjects were scattered across the huge hall, eating, talking, reading and generally trying not to think about whatever Sub-Station One was. Today's breakfast offering seemed to be a limited assortment of pastries, in an array of lurid, artificial colours. Yippee.

With the same amount of enthusiasm we'd summoned to get out of bed, Karly and I had just grabbed some radioactive pastries from the table and settled into beanbags in the corner of the room to people-watch, when a body launched itself into the gap between us with a yell:

"GOOD MORNING PEOPLE! How are my favourite ladies on this fine morning?"

"Oh, hey, Minho."

I glanced up from my breakfast of E-numbers and smiled at him. Karly just raised an eyebrow and asked:

"And how many girls have you tried that on today, Mr Smooth?"

Sleep-deprivation looked a whole lot better on Minho than it did on me. Whilst I was certain I bore a startling resemblance to the Corpse Bride that morning, he still managed to look like a male model. Minho frowned at Karly's question and, to our amusement, actually began to count on his fingers.

"Um… Sarah, Michelle… Amy…three…six – er - less than ten!" He held up his hands in defence. "It was definitely less than ten!"

Karly shook her head in despair as he grinned. "You're disgusting."

"But handsome, so I balance it out."

Minho tried to put a hand on Karly's shoulder and bat his eyelashes at her, but she rolled her eyes and slapped him so that he started to slide off the satin bag and had to grab onto Newt, who had just appeared behind him with Clint and Alby, a look of slight confusion on his face. He dragged Minho up onto the beanbag again with a laugh, catching my eye as he straightened up. If it hadn't been for the smug expression that Minho had been wearing ever since he'd entered the room, the slightly sheepish look in Newt's brown eyes and the heavy limp he was sporting, I would have been convinced that last night was just a really strange dream. After the last few days, I honestly wouldn't have put it past my brain. Meanwhile, Minho was buzzing with energy, his gaze repeatedly flashing towards Dorm 4's still empty table, silently willing one of us to ask him the question. I gave in first.

"Okay, I'll bite. How did it go last night?"

Minho cackled with laughter (if I could use another verb, I honestly would, but there is not another word in the English language that resembles that noise), his eyes gleaming with mirth and even Clint laughed softly and said:

"Gordon Bennet, it was brilliant! I reckon someone needs to rethink the phrase: 'screaming like a girl'!"

Karly broke in then with another sideways glare at Minho: "Well, brilliant until somebody fell off the ladder on the way back and brought Ava Paige down on us!"

I caught Newt's eye again; You see? If it hadn't been you… He smirked as Minho desperately tried to defend himself.

"Hey! I totally saved us though!"

"Ach, yeah, if you consider stuffing the rest of us under the table in the nearest office and smarming your way out of it, saving us. 'Oh, sorry Ma'am, I couldn't sleep – I thought I'd dropped my identity card here last night and, since you're so observant and vigilant (which by the by, mean the same thing), you might have seen it?'"

"Bloody Hell – ya' know I'm actually glad I left when I did!" Newt scoffed, "And she bought that? How are ya' even alive?"

Minho pulled a face, "Eh – yeah, she was too tired herself to do anything else! She sent me back to the dorm and told me I'd probably left it there."

I'd forgotten, amid all of the drama with Newt, that Alby actually had spent last night asleep, like a normal person, and was now standing (having had it rapidly explained to him) with a creased brow and an amused expression.

"For the love," he sighed, "I know you're a bunch of babies, but do I actually need to have you on reins behind a freaking child gate?"

Minho just copied his sigh and whined: "You're so boring, Al – it was hilarious!" as Karly wrapped an arm around Clint, finally cracking a smile as she remembered something.

"Yeah, and our baby Leprechaun here was having a heart attack, 'cause he could see Min's ID in his chest pocket! You were just like: 'Ach, my God, Gordon Bennett, oh my God.'"

Everyone shrieked with laughter as the aforementioned Leprechaun buried his head in his hands, before pulling it out to retort:

"Oh-kay, well first of all, I do not speak like that…"

Eventually, just as Ava Paige was looking increasingly impatient, Dorm 4 trudged in. Chris, the oldest, quietly apologised to Ava Paige and sat down on a beanbag – the image of calm. Some of Minho's other victims, however, had not been so lucky. James was whinging shrilly and picking dried custard out of his coiffed hair, Bruno was scanning the room with a murderous expression and tiny Alvin was venting his adrenaline through aggressively thumping inanimate objects. I snuck a glance at Minho, checking for any signs of repentance, but he was grinning like a lunatic in a padded cell, so I rolled my eyes at Clint instead. He leaned across a purple beanbag and whispered:

"I think we broke Frankie…"

He was right. The short blond boy was rocking backwards and forwards on his heels, muttering 'goawaygoawaygoaway' under his breath and twisting his fingers, his blue eyes darting around the room like a cornered animal. Wow.

"Yeesh. Remind me to never get on Minho's bad side…"

Clint laughed softly, about to answer, but Newt tapped my arm suddenly and I turned to face him. Uh-oh. The sheepish look was back.

"Hey, Lil... I'm, er, sorry about last night. I mean-" He gave an uncomfortable laugh, "Ya' asked me one question and I basically projectile vomited my whole bloody life story at ya'. That wasn't fair - I probably shouldn't have – it's not ya' typical bedtime story – I mean, I should probably be in a mental hospital or therapy or somethin' – um… yeah, I'm sorry about that."

I started; more than a little surprised that he'd actually thought I'd be upset about it. Of course, it had bothered me - it still makes me deliriously angry now, eight years later, and that's putting it mildly. Nobody should have to go through all of the crap that my N did - god, any of the crap that my N did - and I'm not sure there was a right way of reacting to it. But I think, that next morning, the only emotion he appeared to be feeling towards it was extreme embarrassment for some reason, and I was trying desperately to string together some words that would both reassure him and dissolve the sheep that had taken up residence on his face.

"Oh no, honestly N, I didn't mind... um, beautiful metaphor by the way."

He snorted and looked relieved. "Thanks - I try."

And with a flash of his typical crooked grin, we resumed our usual routine, sitting next to each other, watching the mishmash of individuals painting their hundreds of personalities across W.I.C.K.E.D's uniform space – not talking, not worrying, not really even sitting in silence. Just being.

"…Hey, Newton?"

"Mmmm?"

"D'you need help with that Pop-Tart or...?"

Silence. Then a smile.

"Push off, Pasteur."

7:30

When the last of the neon pastries had been demolished and the level of noise in the Canteen was rising without the distraction of food, Ava Paige stepped into the centre of the room and screamed her usual greeting:

"EVERYONE! KIDS! Thank you. Now, I hope you've all eaten up 'cause today's task is a big one. As I think you all heard on the alarm system this morning, Sub-Station One opens today."

Anxious murmuring broke out amongst the groups.

"If you all stop talking, then I can tell you what it is, can't I? Sub-Station One is the first of our many SimPrep stations which you will all become exceedingly familiar with over the next year or so here at W.I.C.K.E.D. The substations will prepare you both for your assessments in the Simulation Stations and, for a select group of you, the Trials themselves."

Her speech continued as we were lead out of the canteen in our Groups and squashed into yet another mega-elevator.

"The Sub-Stations – of which there are roughly twenty – each specialise in a different threat that you may face in the Trials. Sub-Station One focuses on ground conditions, for example: mud and quicksand. Today, you will be taught how to deal with these two conditions, be given an opportunity to practice and then placed under test conditions in a Simulation Station. Now, do not panic; you will be in no danger – a group of teachers will be on hand should you require rescuing. You will, however, be expected to use your initiative and help will only be offered in extreme circumstances."

The gaggle of subjects exchanged apprehensive glances as each group was herded in silence through a different sliding door into chamber-like rooms, this cheerful assurance ringing in our ears. Just in case we still hadn't grasped where we were going (they never valued our intelligence that highly at W.I.C.K.E.D), a fluorescent sign flickered above the door:

"SS1: SURFACE TRAINING #1"

Our room was windowless, lit only by strips of glaring daylight bulbs that were slowly burning holes into our retinas, and set into the patterned-metal flooring was a pair of enormous trap doors that covered almost two thirds of the chamber, each marked with the numbers one or two followed by a complex code that might as well have been hieroglyphics for all we could understand. Two men were standing in front of them, one was young with a black floppy fringe, dressed in navy training gear, and the other looked about fifty-seven, with thick grey hair, a slim W-Tablet in his hand and in a pristine suit. But it was the threatening display covering the entirety of the far wall that caught everyone's attention. It was a weapons rack – but not just a wooden board with a couple of knives strapped on – oh no, I'm talking bows, swords, nets, daggers, rifles, clubs, katanas, javelins, spears, darts, slingshots; anything you can think of was up on that wall. I couldn't help but flash back to Black's pitch to me, something that seemed a lifetime ago, and think: What 'harmless test' could ever require so much weaponry? What the heck are we fighting?

"Is it just me, or does this look exactly like that totally badass scene in Star Wars?"

Jackson's voice drifted across from the boy's line, breaking the stunned silence and earning a few nervous giggles from the subjects around him. Ava Paige allowed herself a small smile at his comment and walked across to stand opposite us with the two men.

"Er - no, Jackson – And we sincerely hope that these rooms will gradually help you become warriors yourselves. In a few minutes I will leave you in the capable hands of your instructors, so without further ado, here is the man that can help you become a 'badass': Mr Colby Austin!"

The younger man stepped forwards with a glittering smile and a friendly wave – now that he was closer, I could see an old silver scar snaking its way from his temple to his left ear, cutting through one of his eyebrows: "Hi, guys!"

"Mr Austin will be your trainer for the majority of your Station Tasks – if you have any problems regarding your training, your general state of mind, or want any extra sessions, you report to him. His door – and mine – is always open. However, anyone found abusing their relationship with their trainer through disrespect or otherwise, will be severely punished. Now, remember what I told you – try your best today. Don't panic."

And with that, Ava Paige vanished out of the sliding doors and back up to her office. Karly leaned over and whispered with a smirk:

"That guy is seriously hot – I may have to report to him pretty often…"

"Karl!" I rolled my eyes at her, disapproving though not disagreeing as Colby watched Ava Paige leave before turning back to us and flashing another smile.

"Okay everyone, formalities first: I'm Colby Austin, I'm twenty-five and I'm gonna be your Trials Trainer for the foreseeable future, but –as long as nobody snitches to Ava – let's just drop Mr Austin right now 'cause frankly, it makes me feel older than I do looking at you lot. Colby'll do just fine."

He had a strong New York accent that reminded me, with a pang, of my Dad's. Colby pointed across to the suited man behind him.

"This is Andreas Maddox, our expert SimPrep technician, so if you see him pottering around, don't worry, he's just making sure that ya'll don't get electrocuted – we are gonna call him Mr Maddox though, because he really is old."

Mr Maddox chuckled, raising an eyebrow and mimed aiming his W-Tablet at the back of Colby's head, getting a laugh from the assembled subjects. Colby just looked behind him and shook his head wearily – it was obviously an ongoing joke – before stepping up to one of the trapdoors to continue his intro:

"Okay, that's pretty much formalities over – please don't try and tell me your names, 'cause I'm not gonna remember them until you're all at least twenty, and I don't want to offend any more of you than I will in your Report tomorrow. So, minimising that – this is the first part of your training." He grinned, "Surface testing: the boring but necessary lesson for everyone planning on going outside this century. Now, we're gonna start y'all off easy – this door I'm standing on is the mud door; nasty mixture of turf, slush and hard earth and the one after that is sand. There's a 99.9% chance that you're gonna have to run across these kinds of ground for at least half of your time in the Trials, so you better be good at it. But, talking to Mr Mathewson, yesterday though-"

Everyone groaned at the mention of the psycho Sports teacher with the lung capacity of a whale.

"-you're all completely useless at running on flat concrete, so I've got my work cut out, ain't I?"

Running a hand through his black hair with a joking sigh, Colby made a signal to Mr Maddox, whose fingers immediately started tapping at the W-Tablet. The trapdoors that Colby was standing on started to creak apart, and the instructor neatly jumped up into the air, landing lightly on the newly simulated surface underneath, his gleaming white trainers sinking a good five centimetres into the mud. He grimaced, gesturing to his feet:

"And Exhibit A: the primary issue with mud. You sink. Fast. In the Trials, none of you are going to have time to stop and extract your various limbs from the mud – those few seconds are the difference between passing and failing. So, the Number One Rule with mud is to look for the hard spots."

Colby skipped forward two steps to demonstrate, onto a spot that looked identical to the one he had just sunk in, but it held firm, supporting his weight.

"This can be kinda difficult – particularly for Newbies like you pack and particularly when you're running full pelt – but usually, once you've found a hard spot, that tends to be linked to another and another, and you can find your way pretty easy. Hard spots have a crunchier texture; like baked bread, but beware the spots with a scaly texture, that'll be a Crust Spot. They harden eventually, but like that, they're an ice-rink that's only just frozen over – can be lethal if you waste your time falling in a big one. Hard mud is more likely to have some wilting turf on it too: there's not enough water in the soil to support life for long."

Picking up a cane, he pointed at a clump of yellowing grass, bending slightly, like an old hairbrush, then towards a lizard-textured patch closer to us. He promptly raised the cane and smashed it into the dirt, shattering the fragile crust and letting the thick mud come oozing up out of the cracks.

"You step in one of those in the wrong way and you can be in it up to your knees, so make sure ya'll pay attention."

We nodded mutely as Mr Maddox entered another command into the system, sending the second set of doors sliding away and revealing what appeared to be a giant sandpit. I stared at the pile, waiting for a huge sinkhole to open up and suck all the sand in like water in a bath, so I was surprised and mildly disappointed when the sand remained stubbornly in pile formation. Somebody in the girls' line obviously thought the same thing:

"I don't get it – where's the quicksand?"

"Aha!" Colby stepped out of the mud pit, wiping his feet on the rubber mat between the two and striding over to the second one. "Elementary, my dear Watson! You see, that question, right there is what could get you kill - badly injured in the Trials-"

Newt tapped my shoulder and mouthed "Killed?!" I shook my head – I'd caught the chilling mistake too, but it had to have been a slip. "He's just dramatic." Well, I hoped so, anyway.

"-and I am going to teach you right now how to work it out. This part is the quicksand."

He waved his cane at a large sandy bit that looked completely identical to the sandy bits on all sides of it. There were murmurs of confusion rising from the crowd before Colby placed his finger on his lips.

"Shh. Thank you. As you have all worked out, quicksand is almost identical to any normal patches of sand and that is why it will be such a danger to you in the Trials. Quicksand is just normal sand, but with an underlying water source or some kind of a river deep under it, and then a couple of tiny streams leading up to the surface. The smaller area between those two streams is usually quicksand. So, as it's formed with water, quicksand almost always has ripples on the surface. Come closer guys, come and check it out."

Somewhat reluctantly, we shuffled closer. There were indeed tiny ripples on the surface of the sand, like the little wavy lines that children draw as grass, 'cause they never have the time or attention span to colour it in.

"So look out for those – now you know about them, they're pretty obvious. Second, if you're in a sandy area try to walk along with a stick and tap the ground hard every couple of metres, just to check you're on a safe track. For example, here-"

Colby stepped onto the sand closest to the edge of the pit and tapped it with his cane. It sank maybe two centimetres, but then hit the harder packed ground below.

"It's solid – safe to run on. But here-"

He stretched the cane out further and plunged it into the rippled sand. It sank right up to the metal ball on its top, almost pulling Colby over with it.

"-just three metres away, it's not. D'ya see how quickly that happened? Best case scenario, it can take hours to get somebody out of quicksand safely, and in the Trials you're gonna be lucky if they give you minutes let alone hours. Worst case scenario, you try to drag 'em out wrong and they sink or you break their bones – and in the Trials you can't afford to leave a person behind. So ya'll might laugh at these classes – and you're gonna have a lot of 'em – but it is so important that ya'll get this, okay?"

"Okay!"

"Um..uh-huh"

"Yep…"

"Great!" Colby answered the chorus of patchy responses with a dazzling grin. "Now who wants to go first?"

We spent the next two hours being bombarded with three textbooksful of information through a mishmash of careful task analysis, Colby's Bear Grylls-esque manner of teaching and pure messed-up trial and error. As usual, the ability range across the group was impressive – Nick and Alby threw themselves into it in seconds, loving the reckless abandon of the task, whereas others like Gally and Sonya were far more wary, dipping their toes into the surfaces the way you would a scalding hot bath. Poor Newt with his sprained ankle had been relegated to a bench on the edge of the room with a W-Tablet to film the lesson (which he spent the entirety of zooming in on Clint as he toppled over every surface that Mr Maddox simulated like a slightly drunk Bambi on ice – "for the love Clint, it's a miracle you can bloody walk!" "Oh ho and you're the expert, Newton?"). Then again, I wasn't exactly doing much better – I played it safe and copied Colby as he repeatedly drowned then rescued a battered looking crash-test dummy from the quicksand, demonstrating what gets you plated in silicon dioxide and what saves you precious seconds (and fingers) in the Trials.

When 10 o'clock finally rolled around and Colby called:

"Good work, guys – Clean up, go have lunch! I'll meet you in the Simulation Station at 12:00 for your test! Move on out!"

It didn't matter how well you'd done; nobody was exactly thrilled about doing it all again, and as an exam this time. Ugh… by this point, I was covered in bruises, mud, there was a small desert-worth of sand matted into my ponytail and I was quickly realising that all of the tasks that W.I.C.K.E.D devised for us had the nasty side effect of extreme exhaustion, but I was no match for Clint. His dark hair was almost brown with mud and sand; there were small cuts all over his shirt and across his skin. He stumbled over to us, as we shed our uniforms in the changing-rooms, picking tiny grains of sand out of his mouth and eyes. I yanked up a wet wipe from the dispenser and gently dabbed at his face, catching the last smudges and making him laugh:

"Ach, thanks Ma!"

"You're welcome, Bambi."

"Hey!" He batted my hands away with a grin.

"Seriously though," Newt slung an arm around Clint's shoulders (an interesting balancing act with N's crutches), "Ya' sure can actually stay alive later, man?"

We all looked up at Clint and raised teasing eyebrows. He sighed impatiently, pulling his Lycra shirt over his head, his brogue muffled by the material:

"Ach, don't worry, you muppets, I got this!"

Honestly, even then I didn't believe him, but I definitely didn't realise just how wrong he was going to be…


	13. Codes, Klutzes and Way Too Many Crushes

**Chapter 13 – Codes, Klutzes and Way Too Many Crushes**

At 12:15, after a mountain of suspiciously crunchy sandwiches had been destroyed, the first forty subjects had collected outside the revolving doors of the W.I.C.K.E.D Centre, waiting for further instructions from Colby. Normally, waiting outside wasn't an issue for us, but today it was 'colder than a penguin's pyjamas', as my Dad used to say, and even the youngest kids were afraid to splash in the puddles in case they stuck to them; ice figures on the frosted sidewalk. I came to W.I.C.K.E.D from Southern USA so I was 95% convinced that my fingers were about to fall off – how could anywhere be so cold after the Sun Flares? With a shudder, I shuffled across to Newt, who was lounging against the nearest wall wearing a short-sleeved shirt and a mocking smile as I scrambled up next to him.

"Somethin' wrong with ya', Piccalilli?"

He feigned confusion, gesturing towards my scarf and the embarrassingly pink bobble hat that I wasn't planning on taking off my head for at least three more hours. Treating him to my most attractive, under-the-eyebrows scowl; I pressed an ice-cold hand against his bare forearm which – to my great satisfaction – made him yelp and swing out of my reach as I answered:

"Nope – I'm just slowly contracting hypothermia, but no worries… and what are you anyway, some kind of snake?"

  
  


"Lizard." Newt corrected, "And nah – I grew up in Britain, Princess, I've basically evolved to survive in an igloo in a torrential downpour. Nice hat, by the way."

"Thanks. Now shut up and stop flaunting your cold-blooded superpowers, Backstreet Boy."

I shivered violently to emphasise my point, and Newt's expression slid from teasing to worried. He dragged himself clumsily across the pristine wall on his crutches to look more closely at me.

"Hey… you're shaking… oh, for the love, just come over here."

With far too little warning, he wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me into him (which in no way helped the goosebumps that covered my arms, despite the sudden temperature increase). I remember thinking he smelled of vanilla, which made absolutely no sense because the soap in our bedrooms was lavender scented. Newt rolled his eyes as I shivered again, but not from the cold– honestly, what is wrong with me?

"Better, Lil?"

"Um, yeah. Thanks."

"No problem – can't have that pretty little nose freezin' off, can we? Plus, you're gonna need it to sniff out all of Axel's impending bullshit later."

Axel was a wonderful individual that the group of us had become acquainted with over the past few days. A fitness obsessed Californian, whose many talents involved grunting, punching passers-by and generally regressing the human race by about two thousand years. He'd been the Neanderthal that had caused Gally and Newt's blue chair massacre on the first evening, and so far, the boys had yet to refer to Axel without the words 'prat' or 'bullshit' in the same sentence. Unfortunately, this opinion of him – though very widely accepted – hadn't spread to all of the subjects and he'd managed to gather a group of cronies around him with a similar number of brain cells.

  
  


"Ugh," I groaned, "I cannot wait. I swear I'm always exactly three seconds away from telling him to push off."

"Well, if he ended up in my group, I'd be tellin' him to push off over a bloody cliff…"

"N!"

"What?" His shoulders were shuddering with laughter, "I'd be sneaky about it, promise – the cops'd never get me!"

I shook my head disapprovingly, but didn't get chance to find out the rest of N's master plan to take out Axel, because Ava Paige, Colby and Mr Maddox came around the corner carrying a series of multicoloured wristbands and ten strange antenna-like devices. The group, as we always did, fell silent as they approached and took their place in front of us. Colby looked down at the shivering subjects and gave us a fleeting smile, but it didn't escape my notice that all of them looked slightly nervous – an observation that did not make me feel any more optimistic about the coming hours.

"Good afternoon, kids!" Ava Paige treated us to a slight variation on her typical opener, "Thanks for arriving so promptly! I trust you're all as excited about the Simulation as I am?"

The silence that greeted her words, ringing with a distinct lack of excitement, answered her question.

"Ah. Well, don't worry; I'm sure you'll enjoy yourselves. Now, as you've all noticed, the temperature out here's not great for July, so we're going to get started right away – follow me please."

  
  


She strode off towards a small black door embedded in the brick wall opposite, unlocked it with a tiny brass key about the size of my little finger and disappeared through the opening, her next few words floating back to us:

"And, believe me, getting lost down here is worse that getting Cut so KEEP UP!"

We kept up.

Behind the opening was a short (luckily for Newt), winding set of stairs that led into yet another chamber, leaving me to wonder if that's all this place was, chamber upon chamber, filled with different 'tasks' and linked with a myriad of corridors, jumbo-elevators and staircases that belong in fairytales. Weirdly, the room's light was provided by a single gas lamp that hung on a chain from the ceiling. Colby – who was carrying the wristbands – squeezed out to the front:

"Okay, guys, so for this task, we're gonna need to split ya'll into groups, so shut up and listen to me. When I call your name come and get a wristband – don't mess around sorting out teams now; we'll do that when we get downstairs. So, Yellow Group: Karly, Harriet, Jackson and Minho, Red Group: Alby, Dmitri, Sonya and Zart, Green Group: Clint, Mariella, Axel and Sam."

We all groaned in sympathy with Clint – nobody's afternoon was going to be fun, but between Mariella's screaming over broken nails, Sam and Axel's general boneheadedness and Clint's own balance issues when it came to quicksand, it didn't really look like his afternoon could get any worse. Colby rattled through the list, calling out the names amid whoops and moans and many barks of "No, you cannot swap teams, they have been specifically engineered" as people identified their teammates. Eventually he got down to:

"And Blue Group: Gally, Nick, Lilianne and Borro. Isaac, you can go with Mr Maddox in a second to take the test electronically. Now everyone, step over to Ava –er, Ms Paige – and she will hand out your precaution gear."

As I went up to collect the blue wristband, someone tapped me on the shoulder. It was Gally, with a terrific shiner blooming underneath his left eye, a nasty remnant of yesterday's test. I smiled at him as I stepped back into the crowd, and he flashed me a huge toothy grin, although with a bruise like that, it must have hurt him – the automaton appeared to have left his optimism undamaged, anyway. I like this kid. Nick and Borro I didn't know very well, but I recognised them as two of the older boys who had aced the lesson that morning, so that was a relief. The 'precaution gear' turned out to be forty blindfolds, made of a thick polyester material, which we were all issued with and forced to put on before we continued down the stairs (and I quote 'for our own safety'). Minho was less than impressed:

"What the hell?! We have to go down three hundred stairs with freakin' blindfolds on? Do you people want us to break our necks?" He waved his arms around, "I mean, Newt's got a snowballs' chance in the Scorch of getting down those stairs without killing himself!"

N snorted, "Thanks a lot, Min."

"You're on crutches dude, you're welcome."

Ava Paige coughed awkwardly – obviously a nervous trait of hers – and placed a hand on Minho's shoulder which he quickly shrugged off. "As I said, it is for your own safety. Don't worry Mr Park, there are less than three hundred and we have a system in place for such situations-"

"Oh thank goodness, a system; we're saved-"

"Unless you wish to return to the compound and have a discussion with Chancellor Michael, Mr Park, you may wish to keep the sarcasm to a minimum."

Minho fell silent, but continued to glare up at Ava Paige from under his eyebrows.

  
  


"Following the protocol everyone, I need you all to put on the blindfolds. Thank you. Now take the hand of somebody next to you – Oh, for goodness sake IT DOESN'T MATTER WHO IT IS. Mr Newton, go with Mr Maddox and put the blindfold on as soon as you leave this room, he will take you to the ETesting classroom."

I heard a door open and close to the left before Ava Paige carried on.

"Keeping hold of the person behind you – Mr Flamel (that was Nick), you are at the front and the steps are about three feet ahead of you. Be careful. There are exactly two hundred and thirty two steps, not including this floor, so make sure you are counting as you go down, placing your free hand on the handrail to the left. When – and only when – you reach the bottom, you may remove your blindfolds and sort yourselves into your groups, ready for the distribution of the equipment you will need for the task. Off you go – Mr Austin and I will meet you at the base of the stairs."

And off we went. One, two, three, four, five, six…While it didn't turn out to be the death-trap that Minho was envisioning, I can't say it was a pleasant experience. Forty-two, forty-three, forty-four, forty-five, forty-six… Even with the blindfold on, we could tell the stairwell was pitch black and faint voices of W.I.C.K.E.D operatives came floating through the walls every so often from nearby chambers, which was more than a little unsettling. It was starting to feel like the set of a bad medieval horror movie. Ninety-seven, ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred…The subjects kept up an unusual level of silence in the dark, everyone's attention focused on counting the steps, nobody keen to go careening down the hundred and whatever number of stairs that we had left – it was only broken by the occasional shout of "Hey! Stop pushing!" as somebody fell out of the rhythm of the others. Two hundred and four, two hundred and five, two hundred and six, two hundred and seven... In the end, the pattern of the eighty feet on the stone and the monotony of the numbers was actually quite relaxing, in a strange hypnotic kind of way, so that when we did reach the bottom, I had to wake myself up a little to undo the knot at the back of my head. Two hundred and twenty-nine, two hundred and thirty, two hundred and thirty-one, two hundred and thirty-two!

"Well that's me done for the day!" Karly laughed in my ear as I fiddled with the double knot. "Minho might have to carry me!"

"But you'd hate that – it means he'd 'win'."

"Well yeah, but I'm shattered! Plus have you seen the guy's arms? Wow…"

I snorted with amusement as the blindfold finally fell away from my eyes – I couldn't keep up with that girl and Minho's 'hotness' in particular seemed to fluctuate with every word the poor guy said to her! The room we were standing in was large but relatively disappointing, considering the effort we'd exerted to get there. It was an almost featureless space, with the only obvious items in it being a large metal door with a lock bigger than Winston's head, ten different coloured circles on the furthest wall and rows upon rows of copper pegs. On the pegs of the first four rows hung pairs of grey leggings and black Lycra running shirts with subject identification numbers emblazoned across the back, similar to the uniforms we'd worn that morning. At Ava Paige's instruction, we each found our uniforms on the pegs and squashed into the tight training-gear along with pairs of black running shoes with deep ridged soles. As we dressed, a different set of pegs caught my eye, to the left of the others. They were bare, but were nailed about half a metre lower than ours, so I assumed they were for the younger children. I hadn't seen the babies of the group: Winston, Jeff, Chuck and the rest anywhere other than the Canteen since the day we were brought to the W.I.C.K.E.D Centre. They must have been trained differently in a separate part of the compound – the tasks that we were completing were too exhausting and probably almost impossible for anyone that young. I felt a pang as I looked at the smaller pegs and when I heard Karly sigh, I knew that she did too. She rubbed her forehead with her fingertips, as she always did when an unbidden thought sprang into her mind:

  
  


"I've got a little brother, you know. Alex. He's nine."

I smiled, hoping that was the right response. "I know. You told me."

"Did I? It's weird actually, he'd love this." She gave a short laugh, "All of this crazy stuff with quicksand and robots – he wants to be an astronaut or a deep sea diver. Yet I'm the one here - me, who literally wrote every Gym Class excuse going - and he's stuck back home, locked up in his room by my Mom. It's so messed up!"

"The world's messed up."

She laughed then – a real laugh. "You're right there, sister!"

"Come on guys!" Colby's voice rang out across the changing room, now sounding slightly irritated. "Before I'm fifty, would be nice! As soon as you're dressed, come and stand by the circle that matches your wristbands. Come on, now!"

The blue circle was the one nearest to the stairs and by the time I got there, Nick and Borro were already standing under it, their heads together, deep in discussion about something. Borro was tall, a muscled redhead from the Scottish Highlands with an amazing accent that took even longer to decipher than Newt's; Nick was slightly shorter, with a Harvard worthy vocabulary, a mop of dark brown curls and sea-green eyes set into a kind looking face. Both were about sixteen years old – in 2067, they were some of the oldest in the entire group. They looked up as I approached and Nick gave me a welcoming smile and called "Hi there, Lilianne!" while Borro just nodded.

When everyone had assembled underneath their designated circles, Ava Paige came along the line of people, giving each team one of the strange devices – which, now I was closer, I could see looked like a huge metal antenna attached to a small screen with protective rubber around the edges – as Colby explained the upcoming task.

"Okay, are ya'll listening? Sam, you're not 'cause I can see your mouth moving. Stop it. Thank you. Right, we're starting you guys off easy today. When you go through that door-" He gestured to the metal monster of a door to his left. "You're going to find yourselves inside the Simulation, and today it looks like a really thick forest with the occasional river, but don't be fooled. Remember this morning's lesson, or you might find yourself in deep trouble – or deep mud as the case may be. Your task is to collect eight coloured stones, each one engraved with a letter, like this."

Colby held up a small purple rock, a little smaller than a ping-pong ball. You could just about see the black 'H' that was etched into the side.

"The device you all have is called a Locator. If you use it properly, it's the difference between getting lost in the Simulation and from winning the Task –it shows the location of all the stones you haven't got yet. Exactly a mile east from your entrance – the entrance faces north - will be an identical door with a complicated automatic lock. When you get to it, you need to put all eight stones into the gaps in the door in an order that makes a word and the door will open. To get through, you need two 'N' stones and two 'G' stones, but other than that, they need to be different – the door won't open otherwise. You need to be back in this room within 90 minutes or you fail the task – keep in mind, guys, that we can impose time penalties for any stupid behaviour and that includes trying to steal stones from other teams. Five minutes to discuss, then we move out."

He shot a sharp look at Clint and Axel's team as everyone started murmuring, debating the task. Borro was nodding again, but with a smile on his face:

"This'll be easy – I'm betting forty-five minutes at the most, Nick!"

Nick didn't look so sure, biting his lip as he answered, "Perhaps that's how they want us to perceive it. Has anything here been that straightforward? I reckon every stone's going to be hidden behind a hazardous surface, or how is it anything more than a treasure hunt?"

Gally, who'd been silent up until this point, frowned, considering it, then said: "Then everyone needs to have a job to do – there's too much to think about for everyone to do all of it." As soon as he'd got the sentence out, he closed his mouth and looked across at me, unsure of his answer. "Right, Lily?"

  
  


I gave him a silent thumbs up behind Nick's back and agreed – it was true. "Yep, Gally's spot on. One of us needs to take the lead, get a stick and keep checking the surfaces – whoever did the best at spotting them this morning-"

"That'll be me." Borro decided. "I grew up in a really wooded area – I knew all of the mud trivia before Colby said it."

Nick nodded, "Yeah, this sounds like the right track. Someone at the back needs to carry the Locator, to keep informing the leader of where we're going. Lilianne, you were ingenious with those machines yesterday, could you do that?"

I coloured at the praise (although he was trying to be nice, let's be honest, 'ingenious' was a bit far. 'ridiculously lucky' was closer to the truth, but I wasn't going to correct him) and answered, "Sure – call me Lily" as Gally piped up:

"Nick and I can keep an eye out for stones and try to work out the word as we're walking!"

Across the five minutes, Nick seemed to have experienced a change of heart. Now he was grinning right along with Borro.

"Actually, you might be correct, my friend – this is evidently going to be plain sailing!"

He broke off when Borro elbowed him in the ribs with a teasing smile.

"Nick?"

"Yeah?"

"Congratulations, you are the first human being to utter the words "plain sailing" since 1947– jolly good, old chap!"

"Oh, shut up."

We were the last group to enter the Simulation, much to the boy's immense irritation because after we'd got our 'divide and conquer' strategy down, we were raring to go. What Colby had said was proving to be pretty accurate. The second we closed the Simulation Door behind us, we were overwhelmed by an attack on our senses: the smell of wood and wet grass filled the air as we set off down a beaten track with the sounds of birds and rustling leaves ringing in our ears. The simulation had built a scene that, on Earth, had been almost entirely destroyed by the Sun Flares – towering trees with twisted branches that definitely belonged in a Tolkien novel surrounded us and every so often, a small insect, like a bee or a butterfly would circle us for a second, before flying back off to where it came from, with the brilliant light of the sun reflecting off its wings. It was, in short, incredible.

"How is this even possible?" Nick had breathed. "I mean, we're at least two hundred feet underground!

"It isn't." Gally stated as he rubbed some of the track dust between his fingers, "My Dad was an IT construction manager in a huge corporation – he'd have known if it was possible to build an underground world! You can create the same effect with special 4D goggles, but that's more like a hologram, you couldn't actually touch anything."

Clapping my hands, I grinned at him: "Whoa there, whiz-kid, maybe you should be the one with the Locator."

"No way! I'd just break it!"

We were distracted from the impossibility of the Simulation by the Locator suddenly whirring to life in my hands. The antenna twisted from side to side, before settling on a location and the small screen lit up with white light, showing a small blue dot in the top left hand corner with the notation '20m NW" next to it. Borro called down from the front:

"What does it say, Lily?"

"I'm not sure!" I called back, "We have to walk twenty metres North West, I think."

Nick worked out that if the door behind us was South, then the beaten track we were already following must be North East. I didn't like it. The fact that a road in the Simulation just happened to lead us towards the first stone seemed suspicious to me, and I could tell by the look on the boys' faces that they were thinking the same thing – Borro had torn a stick off the nearest tree and was slamming it into the ground in a semicircle every two metres. However, despite our scepticism, when we walked twenty metres along the beaten track, Nick suddenly cried:

"Down there, look!"

And dived down to a hollow left by two rocks about a foot off the path. He scrambled up, triumphant, waving two blue rocks, the colour of robin's eggs, each one clearly showing a golden "N" on the side.

"Marvellous!" Nick smiled, "What's next, Lily?"

I looked down at the Locator, confused as the display on the screen didn't change, stubbornly remaining 20m NW. It couldn't be repeating the instruction – our North West was now a huge wall of rock, so that way was obviously out. I turned over the Locator and tapped a small glass square at the bottom of the machine, hoping this would restart it, but instead a red laser beam shone out of it and scanned the two centimetres of air in front of it before bleeping and showing: SCANNED OBJECT NOT COMPATIBLE. That gave me an idea.

"Wait a second – Nick, can I have those stones for a minute?"

  
  


He handed them over with a questioning glance. Turning the Locator upside down again, I passed the first stone under the glass square, letter facing upward, and then repeated the action with the second one. The Locator now gave a higher pitched bleep and the two golden 'N's flashed on the screen before disappearing to reveal an orange dot with 300m E.

"Three hundred metres east." I told them, giving the stones back to Nick. Now it was Borro's turn to look concerned.

"East goes off the path." He frowned, "But then it's a test isn't it? We're not going to find any surfaces if we stay on this track." Using the stick, he gestured towards some dusty footprints continuing off up the path. "Looks like somebody did though."

Moving even more carefully now, we started off on what appeared to be grass, with Borro still tapping the floor with his cane. I was adjusting the Locator antenna, checking that we were still heading in the right direction and Gally's dedication to completing the task was impressive as he wheeled his head around like a baby bird, scanning for any stones that the Locator or Nick might have missed. Our unease was growing with every safe, grassy step we took, so we were actually relieved when after just over a hundred metres, Borro cried out:

"Guys stop! There's some mud up ahead."

We formed a line in front of it, all four of us studying the floor – which was indeed shifting from the soft green moss of the last stretch to a dark, almost marshy ground ahead of us. I pointed to a spot on our left.

"How about there?"

Nick studied it for a second and then shook his head. "It's not completely soft but I think that'd dissolve if all four of us walked on it."

He was right – when you leaned closer to it, you could see the telltale cracks in the surface, spreading out like veins across the mud. Borro stood on one foot, bending over the mud to tap a different patch with the stick and a look of panic crossed Nick's face: "Careful Ro! For goodness sake!"

Borro looked round, surprised, "I'm fine, Nick. I think I can stand on one leg for two seconds." He smiled back at his friend before testing the mud, first with a stick and then with the ball of his foot. It held.

"Okay, I think this is fine. Let's keep going – it's already been thirty minutes!"

I glanced at my watch and realised that it had been– a third of our time gone and we only had two stones! We picked up the pace as we followed Borro across the mud, picking our way between the scaly patches and the watery marsh as we went. We'd almost gone the remaining three hundred metres when a cry sounded from Gally, who was bringing up the rear:

"Uh, Lily?! Nick! Help! I think I'm stuck!"

I spun around, and there was Gally, up to his ankles in black mud and looking an unusual mixture of frightened, embarrassed and sorry for himself.

"I was looking for stones and I thought I saw something and then I slipped!"

Borro gave an almighty sigh as he turned and trudged back to Gally, looking as if he couldn't believe he was doing this. Nick bumped into him with his shoulder as he passed and whispered: "He's just a kid, give him a break – not all of us grew up riding Highland Cows!" Borro laughed at that as he tucked an arm around Gally's shoulders. I'd torn a sharp-looking rock from the path and was scraping and bashing away the black mud at the boy's feet, as it oozed up from the surface. When I'd managed to scrape off the worst of the first layer, I nodded to Nick, who had taken up position on Gally's other side and the two older boys heaved the smaller one upwards, and - with a sucking noise that seemed impossibly loud in the stillness of the Simulation – he squelched free of it and the momentum generated from the pulling sent him catapulting into me. I caught Gally by the shoulders, only just stopping the two of us from flying backwards and he breathed a sigh of relief.

"Thank you! I'm really really sorry, everyone!"

Borro shook his head, "Your shoes are coated, mate – that's not gonna be fun when we get to a sand surface." He reprimanded, but he seemed to be smiling slightly at the younger boy's earnestness. "Now let's carry on."

Again, we did, with Gally making a squelchy-suck noise as he went along – the kind of noise that makes small children wake up from nightmares screaming. I almost couldn't believe it, when about five minutes later, a loud crash sounded from behind us, along with a shout of "GUYS!" and we turned to find Gally in the mud again, but this time in a horizontal position. That was it for Borro.

"We have fifty-five minutes to get to the door!" He yelled. "Are you having a laugh?!"

Gally looked up at us from the dirt with a sheepish expression, his whole uniform coated in sludge.

"No- I, er, slipped again, but, but look!"

He flung his arm into the base of a nearby tree and scrabbled around under it, before pulling his arm out with a wicked grin and presenting me with two small orange stones, decorated with a "G". Jumping up, he bounced around in Borro's face, his glee at having been useful painted clearly across his features.

"You see, Borro? You see, I found one, you see?"

The Scots anger seemed to give way to amusement as he ruffled Gally's hair with an expression of defeat.

"I see kiddo, you dinnae need to yell. Well done."

Gally stopped bouncing around Borro and came and jumped circles around me instead.

"Did you see that, Lil?" I nodded, "Where to next?"

I laughed at the bizarre amount of energy he'd managed to summon from nothing, and I was just scanning the first stone to change the display when a scream of sheer terror ripped through the air.


	14. Bullies, Bearings and Potential Boyfriends

**Chapter 14 – Bullies, Bearings and Potential Boyfriends**

'I was just scanning the first stone to change the display when a scream of sheer terror ripped through the air…'

That scream had a strange effect upon the four of us; standing huddled in the middle of the electronic wonderland that seemed to spread out forever, mile upon impossible mile. For a moment, everything stopped – the regular noises of an aviary-full of birds, the distant crash of water rushing somewhere deep inside the Simulation, the rustle of the identical leaves on the cloned trees, even the soft sounds of our gasped breath in our ears cut out entirely – as if Nick, Borro, Gally and I were trapped inside a glitch in the technology where sound and time ceased to exist. All that was left was the scream. Echoing around our heads, bouncing off our eardrums, waiting to collide with our consciousness – and when it did, all hell broke loose.

"What in God's name was that?!" Nick gasped, as Borro whipped a bone-handled knife from his belt. Gally hit the ground immediately at the noise, his hands over his ears. A muffled crashing sound followed it, like several people running, but whatever it was seemed to be moving away from us. I reached down and pulled Gally to his feet, keeping hold of his hand and looked towards the boys.

"That was one of the others. We need to check it out."

Borro stared at me like I'd just acquired an additional head.

"Are you insane? We have no idea what's going on over there, and whoever that was has a team whose job is to keep them safe – we, on the other hand, have fifty minutes to reach the door. They'll be fine; we dinnae have time to be fishing out eejits!"

He'd barely finished his sentence when another scream tore through the stillness, making everyone flinch, and I stared at him, feeling horror dance across my features.

"We can't just leave them! If they thought they were fine then they wouldn't be screaming. It'll be easier to help with eight people!"

I tossed a desperate glance at Nick, certain that he'd back me up, but to my dismay, he too was shaking his head. He met my plea with an expression that bordered on pity.

"Ro's right, Lilianne – we don't have time. It might even be a test or something – and even if it's not, we'll only get in the way."

I couldn't believe it. Now, I might not have got out much as a kid or gone to a school for longer than five years, but I had always just assumed that this was one of those basic rules of humanity that you didn't question: when somebody is screaming, you help them. Even if you're stuck in a man-made landscape with strange stability issues, paranoid boys and a situation that may or may not be a trap. How could they be so self-centred? Was this what the Flare was doing to the world? The boys, tired of my defiance, had continued to pick their way across the mud – even though I hadn't told them the direction yet. I just stood and watched. After a couple of seconds, Nick turned round.

"Lilianne?"

"I'm not going. I'm not scanning these things until we go and find that person and you can carry on if you want – finish missing a person, I don't care – but I'm going to help."

Spinning on my heel, I jumped across the stretch of mud towards the grass, ignoring their protests and only just managed to scrabble onto the bank, sending a spray of sticky mud up into my face. The shouts were stronger on this side and they were coming from somewhere to my right. The ground looked fairly stable, which was lucky, because I didn't have time to check it.

"WHERE ARE YOU?" I called, "IT'S THE BLUE GROUP, WHERE ARE YOU?"

The screaming cut out for a second before the answering cry shot back: "OVER HERE, OVER THE STREAM – HELP, I'M SINKING, PLEASE HELP ME! QUICKLY, HELP ME!"

I recognised the voice. Clint. Cutting through the carbon-copy trees and leaping over branches, I scrambled clumsily in the direction of the noise. The further I went, the louder the sound of rushing water became. It wasn't long before my trainers sank a little and I was standing on a marshy riverbank, up to my waist in reeds and facing a two-metre wide, roaring stream without a bridge. Fantastic. Now what?

"CLINT, IT'S LILY! HOLD ON! STAY AS STILL AS YOU CAN!"

I tried to throw some advice at the boy, whilst desperately searching for a next move myself. As I seemed stuck at a midget 5'2, there was no way I could jump the stream, despite the adrenaline that was coursing through my veins. The only rocks in the river were half submerged, so stepping-stones were out. There wasn't even an overhanging piece of turf to make the jump shorter. I was just about to scream with frustration myself, – Colby said a person in quicksand could sink in minutes if they moved the wrong way, what was happening to Clint? – when I heard running footsteps behind me. A panicked-looking Gally emerged from the copse of trees, followed by a disgruntled-looking Nick and a cursing Borro. A strange mixture of relief and anger flooded through me at the sight of them. I bit back the scathing remarks that the anger conjured and tried to focus on the issue at hand, limiting myself to a simple:

"Well, it's about time. We need to get over there, it's Clint – does anyone have any ideas?"

Borro flashed one final black look at me before scanning the immediate area. His gaze caught on a pile of driftwood about three metres to our right.

"Well, you can't mention time, Lilianne, since you've wasted so much of it, but if we could lift enough of that timber and throw it over the river, we could probably cross it. C'mon, Nick. You two find the narrowest section."

They ran towards the pile, leaving me and Gally to survey the river. If you looked closely, there was a section of the opposite bank that had a collection of rocks wedged into it, meaning the water hadn't leached into the turf – the boards wouldn't sink there.

  
  


It took us about six minutes to construct a functional bridge and my increasing worry was beginning to filter into the others – Nick's grey eyes were darting towards the distant sand even more frequently than mine. As I took hold of Borro's hand for balance on the boards I gave the boy a ghost of a smile.

"Borro?"

"Yeah?"

"Thanks for coming back. I couldn't have crossed this alone."

He sighed then and gestured to the other two boys, "Nah, Lilianne – it was Nick and Gally that wanted to turn round. I was outnumbered." But I didn't think he meant it. We leaped off the boards on the other side and started to run towards the patch of sand. "Now come on then, kid, let's go rescue your eejit."

By the time we finally reached the quicksand, I was terrified. The screaming had ceased while we were crossing the river and my brain was providing an array of morbidly colourful explanations for the silence. It wasn't actually a very big patch, about three metres wide, so it looked like only Clint could ever have managed to fall in. The boy was smack bang in the middle of it, up to his waist in silicon dioxide and he called out another feeble sounding "Help!" as we jogged into his eyeline, but it was obvious he was petrified of moving and sinking further. He was taking Colby's advice and staying as still as he could, but I could see him trembling from here. There was no sign of the rest of the Green group.

"Clint!" I pulled out the pole of the locator and started to make my way towards him, tapping at the earth, but I could only come within about two metres of him before the tip sank into the ground. Nick moved a bit closer, hovering behind me; giving Clint the best smile he could muster and said:

  
  


"Don't worry – quicksand isn't like you see in films. People have only ever died if the tide comes in, if they get hypothermia or if they panic and sink over their head. None of that's about to happen to you, Clinton, okay? Nod at me please, so I know you're understanding."

This reassurance had only slightly dimmed the panic etched into Clint's face, but he managed to nod and stutter:

"No – I – I hear you. I get it."

"Good. Okay, so this is going to sound absurd but I need you to lie back onto the sand-"

"What?!" Clint looked like he had no intention of doing anything of the sort. His eyes flicked towards me, pleading. "No! I'll sink – that won't work – Lily, tell them – I-"

I bit my lip and whispered to Borro, "Realistically, how long do we have to get him out?"

"Ach, I don't know – ten minutes, fifteen if we wanna push it."

"Right." I gripped Nick's shoulder and stretched out a little further towards Clint. "Clint? Lean backwards – it'll free your legs. We can find a stick and use it to drag you out. Trust me, okay?"

As usual, my reassurance techniques were limited to cliché and ridiculous. Nobody ever trusted someone who said 'trust me', but I had neither the energy nor enough functioning brain cells to come up with anything better. Either way, Clint registered my words and bent himself back until he was lying flat on the sand. A look of alarm flashed across his face as his head hit the ground and he closed his eyes for a second before calling out:

"What now?"

Nick turned again towards Borro and Gally. "Can any of you see a stick we could use? We need to put something under his back."

They couldn't. The problem was, as complex as the Simulation appeared to be, it was computer-generated and the sand section had only been programmed with thin, wispy sticks that you couldn't even toast a marshmallow on. It was me that suggested using the Locator. At the time it seemed like a good idea – the pole was reasonably thick, at least four or five centimetres wide and it extended about 1.5m out. I unstrapped the Locator from my belt – the display now showing 300m SW -and, following Nick's instructions, stretched the pole out to Clint, sliding it under his back, level with his hip-bones. After seven excruciating minutes, involving a lot of yelling, cursing and painstakingly small movements, I managed to get the boy to the edge of the quicksand.

  
  


"Okay, this is the tricky part: you need to twist off the pole Clinton, but you need to twist towards Lilianne or you're going to fall right back in and we dinnae have time to save you. Are you hearing me?" Clint nodded, for what must've been the fiftieth time. "Great. Lilianne – you need to pull the pole out at the same moment. Ready? One… two… three!"

Clint threw himself off the pole, pitching sand in every direction, making me screw my eyes shut against the spray, when something suddenly caught in the Simulated Surface and the Locator tugged out of my hands. I felt myself jolted forwards and a strangled shriek of fright escaped me before Nick grabbed the back of my shirt, trying to catch the Locator, but it had been wrenched a good metre out of our reach. All we could do was watch as our only navigation tool sank into the shifting surface. For a moment nobody spoke, all five gazes fixed on the spot that the Locator disappeared. And then everybody did.

"What in God's name-"

"ARE YOU HAVING A LAUGH? THIS IS WHY I SAID WE WEREN'T GOING BACK!"

"Yeah? Well, maybe if you hadn't gone all know-it-all Bear Grylls on us, then maybe we'd have actually had a plan and brought a stick from the other side!"

"Ach, I'm sorry everyone – I'm really sorry, but perhaps we could-"

"Bear Grylls? You were the one that just took off like a drunken Road-Runner – if you hadn't been such a bampot then maybe I'd have thought of it!"

"Guys-"

"Like 'bampot's even a word – you just made that u-"

"WOULD EVERYBODY JUST BE QUIET?!"

Gally. He'd pushed forward to stand in the middle of the group, hands on hips, looking a lot older than his thirteen years. He seemed surprised at first that everybody had shut up but quickly recovered himself, fixing each of us with an accusing stare. "It doesn't matter what we might have done – we didn't do it. Borro – you're the one who keeps going on about minutes and now we only have thirty-five, so let's do something with them – we still have four stones to find! Lily, did the Locator say which way we have to go before you dropped it?"

"Yes – 300m South West, so back towards those trees."

"There we go then." Gally nodded and, before anyone else could comment, strode off in the direction of the wood.

For a moment nobody spoke, all four gazes fixed on the small boy trekking away from us. Then Nick started to laugh:

"Well, that's us told. We better follow the Captain!"

As we hiked in a direction that we hoped was South West, I turned back to Clint, whose breathing had evened out, though his face was still couple of shades lighter than usual.

"Are you okay?"

"What? Ach, yeah, I'm okay – just remind me to scrape my pride off the floor when we get back…"

I laughed and he covered his face with his hands. "I told you I'd mess it up."

  
  


"Actually, your exact words were "don't worry, you muppets, I got this", so I'm never going to trust you ever again, but hey! Anyway – Newt twisted his ankle tripping over on a flat roof last night and almost fell through a window, so you're not exactly alone."

"No, guess not. It felt like it though. Thanks for fishing me out."

"'S okay." His words reminded me just how alone he'd been when we got there. "What happened to your team?"

He laughed this time, but humourlessly. "Oh, they buggered off the second they saw I'd fallen. Mariella would've come back, I think, she sort of dithered a bit when the other two legged it, but Axel just flipped me off and left – and Sam doesn't have enough brain cells to think for himself, so…"

"Prats." I muttered, realising what a satisfying word N's favourite insult was. That made Clint smile before we fell silent again, our eyes scanning the area for the next two stones.

To his delight, it was Gally that found them, wedged into the mud in the middle of our path. One was a black "C" etched into a deep ruby coloured stone, the other a white "A" in an ebony stone. Borro voiced what we were all thinking:

"Well, now what? We cannae scan them, cause we don't have a Locator, and this place is probably bigger than Narnia-"

"Aww, you watched Narnia, Ro?" Nick broke in with a smirk.

"Shut up, Flamel, like you didn't. Point is we don't know where we're going now. The other two stones – and the door, for that matter – could literally be anywhere."

Clint was frowning and he suddenly stepped forward with his hands up. "Wait a second, everyone. I was talking to Mariella earlier, and we thought there was something weird about the areas with the stones. I'm not sure I can explain it, but the noise is different, like, staticky and the air seems shiny – oh, I don't know, but if I'm not imagining it, maybe we could look for places like that..."

He trailed off, unsure, keen to help, yet not wanting to take up any more of our time. But Nick, for once, was the one nodding. He pointed to the spot in the road that Gally had dug the stones out of.

"You know, I think he's correct. Look there – there's a sort of shimmer around us."

There was. In fact, it was so obvious that I'm not sure how we hadn't noticed it before. When you leaned closer to the spot, there was a low humming noise like a bee trapped in a glass box.

"That doesn't solve the problem though," Borro reminded us, "This place is still huge, we have twenty five minutes - we can't just wander through the forest looking for a shiny spot."

  
  


"No..." I stepped closer to one of the trees at our side, trying to gauge the distance between the simulated branches. "But none of the Locator distances have been bigger than three hundred metres. So, chances are, the last two stones and the door are probably pretty close to us. If someone could climb a tree, maybe we could spot Clint's 'shiny air' from up there."

"I'll do it." Nick dropped the letter-stone bag onto the floor and swung himself up onto the first branch of the nearest tree. The canopy was pretty high up, so Nick was a good twenty metres off the ground before he broke through the ceiling of leaves. Borro's face went white and he yelled up:

"Nick?! What happened to look before you leap?! Plan your steps, man, good god!"

The older boy's laugh filtered down to us through the branches: "I'm fine, Ro! I think I can climb a tree for a few seconds – just 'cause I never rode a Highland Cow…hey! I can see something! It's sort of that way-"

He gestured wildly in some direction that we couldn't see, making the branches shake, before Borro yelled again:

"NICK! DO NOT LET GO OF THAT TREE!"

"Okay, I'm not! Fine, I'm approximating it's a bit further to the South, maybe South East this time… Yep, I've got it – coming down!"

To Borro's immense discomfort, Nick practically slid down the last few metres of the tree, landing in the slushy ground with a squelching thump. He looked across at his friend and smiled again at his worry. "I'm fine, Grandma – I promise I'll never do it again."

"Hmpf." Borro grunted and tossed Nick's bag back at him. "Next time I'll let you break your neck. Okay, which way are we going 'cause, as you just reminded us with that stupid lack of self-preservation, we don't have much time."

"I know, I know –it's not far. This way, next to three or four oak trees. Come on!"

Nick really wasn't kidding when he said it wasn't far. The oak trees were only about a hundred metres away, across a small stream that a previous group had already placed a log over. I spotted these stones, caught in an eddy in some reeds next to the log. One was a milky white, the other a deep green– bearing the letters 'I' and 'H'.

"We did it!" Gally yelled, punching the air. "We've got them all – now all we have to do is find the door! We did it! I told you we could!"

His moment of assertiveness seemed to have passed and I felt myself smile: "Not quite, Captain Gally, we've got no idea where the door is – and we have fifteen minutes now."

"Well, that's okay – Nick can just climb another tr-"

"Nick is not climbing any more trees." Borro was decisive. "He's far too reckless with them."

"Hey, I was perfectly adept at climbing the last tree."

Clint spoke up again: "Um, guys? How about we just try that door?"

We all turned around to where Clint was pointing. In the trunk of the final oak tree – which had definitely been solid wood with a couple of electronic butterflies on it two seconds ago - was a large, panelled door, with the letters W.I.C.K.E.D printed around the edges. However, in place of a simple keyhole, there was a large metal plate in the centre, with eight hexagonal hollows beaten into it. Above the hollows, were the words "intrabit in verbo: transuerso".

"What does that mean?" Gally wrinkled his nose. Nick just nodded and reached for the pouch on his belt:

"It's Latin – it means 'enter the word: reversal'. I don't know about the reversal bit, but we need to unscramble the letters." He spread them out in the dust in front of us. "N –N –G-G-I-H-A-C. Well, it's doubtless an 'ing' word – that leaves H-A-G-N-C. What words come out of that?"

For a couple of minutes, we thought aloud, throwing any random suggestions into the air.

"Hag?"

"Nagging?"

"Nah – you need three 'G's"

"Could you have it with an 'H' rather than a 'G'?"

"Naghing? No way! Plus there's no 'C' in that."

"Well, it's got to be something to do with 'reversal', hasn't it? What are some synonyms?"

"Ach, yeah, okay - what's a reversal, then?"

"A switch?"

"A rewind?"

"A cancellation?"

Then it hit me. Something Newt had mentioned the night before.

"A change! A reversal is a change! That's what's happening to our lives, to the world – they're changing!"

  
  


Clint leaped up and started rearranging the stones. "Gordon Bennett, you're right! C-H-A-N-G-I-N-G! Changing! Quick, put them in, Gally!"

The boy looked surprised: "Me? Shouldn't Nick do it? He climbed the trees."

I'm pretty sure that if the others hadn't been trying to uphold their reputations, all four of us would have 'aaahh'ed at his innocent expression. I scooped the stones off the ground and tipped them into Gally's hands. "No way – you found half of them, didn't you? Now, hurry up, we've only got a few minutes!"

"Oh – er – okay!" He couldn't hide the pleased grin that spread across his face. "Okay – so, C…H…A…N…G…I...N...G!"

As he slotted in the final 'G', a whirring sound started up, deep inside the oak tree, before the door swung open, revealing some steps upwards. Despite the multiple disagreements, panics, sharp words and general stressing of the last few hours, we exchanged triumphant looks and smiles. Gally gave me an awkward one-armed hug as I pushed him towards the steps. We'd finished!

2:55 PM – The Training Room

By the time the five of us stumbled up the top steps into the changing rooms, there were only five minutes left on the timer. The room was almost empty and the majority of the groups had already changed, handed in their equipment and crashed in the Common Room. Ava Paige came clacking over to us with an expression that was an unusual mixture of proud and disappointed (something that must have been physically quite difficult to achieve):

"Blue Group! Congratulations on completing your first test in the allocated time – there are still two teams who have yet to manage it." Her lips pressed together into a thin line then and I braced myself. "However, do you realise how expensive those pieces of equipment are? We do not give you life-saving advantages like that for you to throw them into quicksand! That Locator alone will be worth more than all of your parents' houses put together! But you paid with your mistake with time and now you are late for tea – go and change and head to the Common Room immediately. Remember, if you squandered your equipment like that in the Trials then the price could be far higher, children…"

And with that ominous warning, she swept away, leaving Colby to collect our wristbands and the stones. When he reached us, he flashed us one of his brilliant smiles. "Actually guys, one of those is only really worth a small bungalow." He laughed, "Don't let her scare you – the first test's never simple and ya'll did great. As soon as Mr Maddox dissolves the landscape, we can get the Locator back easy. And between you lot and me - I reckon that stunt with the Locator might have been Maddox's idea anyway... Clint, are ya' all right?"

When he nodded, Colby jerked his head towards the hall opposite us. "The Green group got in about fifteen minutes before you guys, but Ava's really marked them down for leaving Clint. Like I said before, you'll need everybody you can get in the Trials and there's no way you'll get through it without a solid team – you need to be able to trust each other. With the minus points the Green Group got, it puts them below the pass grade, so you did the right thing."

Giving Gally a pat on the back as he removed his wristband and walked away, the instructor called over his shoulder: "I'm real proud of y'all!"

We expected the hall to be empty when we pushed open the sliding doors, almost ready to collapse, but instead the Green Group was still in there, banging mud off their running shoes. I felt Clint stiffen next to me. They looked up at the noise; Axel caught sight of Clint and smirked – not the teasing, almost smiling, smirk that Nick or Newt typically gave, but a cold, almost cutting one.

"They didn't drown ya', eh, Clinton? Shame – they wouldn't have to waste time Cutting you. You should've just left him in there – suffocated in the grass dust!"

He started to horse laugh then – a weirdly humourless sound – and it took Sam precisely 0.2 seconds to join in and parrot the noise. Nick, behind us, muttered 'Oh, for the love of God…' and strode across the hall, throwing his bag up on the pegs while remarking to Axel:

"Really, sand is predominantly silicon dioxide. 'Grass dust' is literally just dust."

  
  


Axel's attention was diverted at that and, like a cat with a shiny light, he found it difficult to focus on more than one person at a time. Nick had challenged him, so was therefore his newest victim.

"Oh right – 'silicon dioxide', eh?" Axel started to imitate Nick's uptown accent, putting on a ridiculously high voice. "What's your name, anyway, Einstein? Isn't it Nicola or something camp like that?"

Nick's back was turned against Axel and he barely turned his head to respond, though his voice had got slightly quieter. "Nick Flamel, actually. Alchemist. But Nikola Tesla was a 20th century inventor – a superlative man. Discovered the rudimentary Alternating Current."

Axel had moved a little closer to Nick now, and the smirk had slithered a few more centimetres up his face. The high voice got even more ridiculous. "Oooh, fancy – 'rudimentary', 'superlative' – that's so effing gay, Flamel (only he didn't say 'effing')."

Sam's horse laugh racked up a few more notches, into whole new levels of moronic hilarity. Nick rolled his eyes, but he was beginning to look more than a little uncomfortable – both because of Axel's proximity and the turn that his words were taking. He was about to take a step backwards, when suddenly Borro was there, standing between the two boys, his hands out towards Axel and his eyes narrow.

"What did you just call him? 2014 rang - it wants its insult back. Do you have a problem with my friend or something?"

Now it was Axel that took a step back. He might have been lifting his Daddy's weights, but even at six foot, Axel had to look up at to stare Borro in the eye. His accent – like N's – was stronger now he was angry. Nick lightly touched Borro's shoulder, trying to pull him backwards, whispering. "Ro, it's fine – he's just ignorant. Leave him alone, I'm fine."

"No it's not bleeding fine, Nick, he's being an arse."

Axel had backed up a safe enough distance for him to aim another careful taunt:

"Yeah, MacDougal, listen to Nicola."

"Och, push off!" (Borro also used some slightly stronger words than this, but I'll leave those to your imagination.) He took another four steps forwards that sent Axel skittering backwards another ten. "Go flex your ego at somebody who gives a bleeding damn. Or I'll thump you from here to Glasgow."

Axel took one final look at Borro and Nick, and then at the rest of us, as if he was assessing how much getting into this fight would be worth. He obviously didn't rate his chances. After giving each of us a look blacker than pitch, he snapped his fingers at Sam and stalked out of the double doors with his crony scampering behind him. Mariella got up to leave then too, but before she opened the doors, she paused and looked back at Clint. Biting her lip she called:

"Clint? Are you okay?" He just nodded.

"I'm really sorry, I couldn-"

"Yeah, I know – It's fine, Mariella." She mirrored his nod and scurried out of the room.

The second they'd gone, Nick raised his eyebrows at Borro. "Um, unnecessary. Thank you, but, unnecessary." Borro just raised his eyebrows right back.

"Um, necessary. And I'll do it again if I have to." And then he was gone too.

Nick tipped his head back and sighed heavily, as I stopped to hug him by the doors.

"Thanks Nick. For stopping me drowning in mud and for coming back and for not tearing my head off over the Locator mess."

"Your welcome, Lily. You were right anyway – and Ro was doing enough head-ripping for the lot of us! "All for one and one for all" and all that jazz."

"Yes! I know that – Three Musketeers!"

"Got it in one." He smiled as I started to walk away. "You know, I don't think Axel's finished with us yet – nobody likes to fail, and Ro just made him look like a six-year-old. I think he'll be out to get us after today."

And while that was true – my relationship with Axel was never unicorns and butterflies – Axel caused far more trouble for Nick Flamel than he ever did for me.


	15. Dates, Discos and Unicorn Onesies

**Chapter 15 –Dates, Discos and Unicorn Onesies**

After that first Test, everything at W.I.C.K.E.D started moving very fast for the group of us. The days started to melt into one, trial after trial after trial – and they did vary to an extent: we had water trials, running trials, construction trials, farming trials, cleaning trials; pretty much anything you can think of, they made us do – and before long, it seemed like we'd blinked and three months had passed. Yet, in that strange way that time has, it simultaneously felt like forever since we'd all rattled in on W.I.C.K.E.D's rusting train, confused, hopeful and a little bit frightened. Even then, we had all aged a lot more than those three months. Looking back at it now, as I write this, it feels like another life. But, after those months, while W.I.C.K.E.D could never be 'home' for any of us, it was starting to feel like more than a cold, featureless research facility. We were gradually getting used to our surroundings, not getting lost on the way to the Common Room and ending up in a storage cupboard, not running down the corridors with the security cameras in them, not listening to Minho when he swore blind that 'this is definitely the way to go, guys' because we swiftly learned where that would land us (never, ever, where we were trying to go, and typically in detention).

However, we hadn't escaped without considerable injury – Newt set the bar on the first night and since then, everyone had been competing to outdo him. Alby broke a finger playing football, Winston smashed into a doorframe on a bicycle, I pulled a wrist muscle and Karly broke multiple nails in a variety of tests, but the only person who actually did manage to top N's sprain was Gally, who broke his arm in two places falling out of an oak tree with Jeff.

  
  


Friendship was also something that got rigorously explored by the three hundred kids at W.I.C.K.E.D – we forged it, tested it, bent it, strengthened it and generally twisted and stretched it in every direction to see how far it would go before it snapped and you wound up with an earth-shattering fight on your hands. Everybody bickered and grumbled and had that one person that they would go out of their way to avoid being partnered with, but usually – though earth-shattering fights definitely took place – everybody just got closer. Every day brought a new random piece of information about the people around us: Clint has a crippling fear of clowns, to the point that you can't even say the word 'clown' in his presence without earning a shudder, Alby can beatbox like nobody's business (a fact discovered on an unusual evening where we were left alone in the Common Room, bored, with 'ABBA: Greatest Hits') and Newt, to this day, is the only person I've ever met that can solve a Rubik's cube in under ten minutes whilst having a heated debate over the historical accuracy of Downton Abbey. And that is truly just the tip of the iceberg. I hadn't collected the 'coolest circle of friends' – the soccer players or the beauty queens – but, god, did I love my weirdos. And yes, I am aware that I am being inherently cheesy, and everyone reading this (including myself) has been eyerolling for at least two paragraphs, but it's true. I still believe that the half an hour spent watching Gally chase Winston round the tennis courts, coated in a technicolour layer of silly string as they pretended to be a demented version of Tom and Jerry is one of the funniest half hours of my life.

  
  


But, of course, at the end of these three 'easy' months, we were presented with the gift that every high-school student in the history of the universe has come to dread. Exam season. I'm not about to lie: as a group, we were pretty pernickety – a lot of complaining went down – but the day Chancellor Michael announced that we were going to have exams, I thought the roof might split open through the sheer pressure of the outburst that ensued:

"Ughhhhh…"

"- what happens if we fail?"

"Bro, I came here to get away from school – is this a joke?"

"Is it optional?"

"Our whole lives are a test – it's not fair!"

"What! Oh man, I haven't read a textbook since 2057!"

"Wait, dude – you can read?"

The exams, in the end, weren't actually that bad – plus, Chancellor Michael told us they didn't count for anything except as a 'progress checker', so it wasn't the end of the world. I only pulled four all-nighters. One of the funniest things about the exams was actually watching how the others took them: I swear I didn't see Al for about three weeks – he spent the whole time holed up in the library or throwing weights around in the gym, Newt acted like the sky was going to fall in and spent at least half an hour every morning giving me a detailed list of all the reasons that he was 'absolutely, completely going to mess up these bloody things!" , Karly, Clint and I became the proud collective owners of 357 flashcards and Minho, decided that he didn't give a flying fish about a week in and decided he could 'breeze' them. ("I mean, my physical grades are going to take some pulling down, dude!") We left him to it.

It was about a week after our final exam, and we were sitting in "Knot Basics: 101" with Miss Lockhart – a young, fiercely intelligent British woman from Yorkshire, who was the reason all of us could tie more knots than an obsessive Scout and had perfect Yorkshire accents by the end of our time there – when Mariella came up with 'The Ball'.

  
  


"Oooh, guys – you'll never guess what I was thinking the other day!" She grinned, looking up from her half-finished 'Fisherman's Knot'. Karly glanced over at the boys' table on the other side of the room, where Minho, Newt, Alby and Clint were mastering twine "Carrick Bends".

"That Minho Park should wear an actual shirt, rather than that hideous blue excuse for a vest?"

I rolled my eyes (although that vest really was a crime to humanity) as Karly got in her third Minho joke of the day and Mariella snorted:

"Ugh, no way, he looks hot – No, I was thinking: everyone's been so stressed out lately, like, maybe we could do something fun, to help everybody relax before results day – at my old school, we used to have a prom right after exams. Obvi, we can't have a prom – hello, there's no nail bar in this dump – but we could have a dance, right?"

"A dance!" Sonya's head snapped up, "Oooh, we did that once back home - that would be so much fun!"

Even Karly seemed to like the idea, leaning forward, her 'Fisherman's Knot' discarded on the table. "Yeah – we could make it really awesome in that white hall with all the huge windows. If we had a theme, we could hang some fabrics and switch the light bulbs colours, and try and beg some food off the Canteen people."

"Ugh – maybe not…" I grimaced, remembering the rubbery eggs at breakfast. "Wouldn't it be safer to help Siggy cook everything? He'd love that – and we could have cake without the food poisoning!"

Everyone groaned and nodded, before Harriet said: "Hey, maybe we could have a Sadie Hawkins? You know, where the girls ask the guys?"

"Ugh, nooooo…" Mariella shuddered at the idea, "I don't want to make an exhibit of myself – plus, I think the task of asking us out will really give the boys a chance to display their- their emotional bravery."

I bit back a smile as I watched Frankie (now fully recovered from the zombie incident) tying Jackson's shoelaces together under the desk- hey, at least he was practicing knots - while Edward looked on, snickering at something hilarious that Sam had carved into the table, before I caught Karly's eye, and her equally amused expression.

"Sorry to burst the bubble, Ella, but I think their 'emotional bravery' might be pretty well hidden somewhere under all of the testosterone and ego that's going on over there – you wanna look, be my guest, girl, but it might take a few decades!" Karl giggled.

My mind suddenly flashed back to everything that N had told me a few months ago in the hospital, half-drunk on exhaustion and embarrassment – hmmm. If there was a definition for whatever 'emotional bravery' was, that was it. As for a dance, this was the kind of thing that six years of house arrest and cheesy chick-flicks had definitely prepared me for – I knew all about what went on at High School Proms: gorgeous dresses, mean girl gets punch poured down her front and the leads all but get married in the final scene. I was pretty sure I had this. Mariella had already got permission from Ava Paige to have the party in the main hall on Sunday – the day before results and four days from now – that gave me four days to get somebody to ask me out. Ha! That should really have been something that my arsenal of guy friends was useful for (I'm twenty-one, and nothing has changed – I share my house with six men), but I ran through my list of friends and came up completely blank. There was no way Karly wasn't going to collar Min, Alby stared at Harriet all through class so he had to ask her, Jackson had started dating Olly, Nick was basically my adopted brother, and Newt… well…dream on, Lily.

  
  


As the bell rang for the end of class and we filtered out, full of excitement, sequins and ideas, I shook my head and decided that, if all else failed, I could always get Winston to take me.

Thursday – 2:00 PM – Newt's P.O.V

"So d'you think the Macarena counts as a dance?"

It was official. Dance-fever had taken over the whole campus. Minho was asking me about dances – Minho.

"Um, well, yeah, but this is fancy stuff, Min, I ain't sure the Macarena's gonna cut it."

"Ugh!" He raked his hands through his hair with a dramatic sigh, "Come on, dude! I need help – you're the dancer - didn't you used to do dance classes or something?"

As a matter of fact, I did – this was a detail that I had avoided mentioning to Minho until we had to pick our P.E options last month (it was that, football or wrestling – seriously?). Ma had put me in for classes when I was a kid, hoping I'd turn out to be the next Fred Astaire – that never happened, but, hey, I was working on Billy Elliot before the Sun Flares. Dance Class was probably the first thing my Pa cut after that; he'd never drive me there anyway. I'd missed it (another something I wasn't planning on sharing with anyone. It was better just to laugh and pretend there'd been no space left on football).

"Yeah, but I ain't sure streetdance or ballet are going to cut it either." I smirked, "The world just ended – I'm pretty certain none of the girls know how to bloody waltz, just spin 'em around a few times, maybe a few dips without smashin' someone's skull into the ground, and you'll be fine."

"Also," Alby interjected, crashing onto the sofa next to me with Jackson. "Don't you need a date before you start flapping about dancing?"

Minho scoffed: "Oh, that'll be easy." He flexed his muscles in a frankly horrible blue shirt he'd worn specifically to show off said muscles. "I have a queue of potential choices…"

"Ya' know they actually have to agree to go with you, Park?"

Jax grinned and shot: "Well, just saying: I wouldn't be going anywhere with him in that revolting vest -where did you find that?"

Minho looked mortally wounded, clasping his hands to his chest before aiming a cushion at Jackson's head.

"Does anybody else want to say anything about my favourite vest?"

"Yes – it's disgusting, Min. Burn it."

I turned to see Lily in the doorway, wearing a deceptively sweet smile, with Minho's current obsession, Karly Linnaeus, at her side. Karly had been ridiculing 'The Vest' since breakfast - and Min had been trying to ask her out since about the same time. And there was another situation that I had no idea how to handle - girls in general, while I was pretty sure I'd never understand them, I was getting used to living with- but asking them out? As in, would you like to attend a fancy ball with me, and please don't crush my self-esteem and say no, asking them out? The closest I'd ever come to a school dance was watching 'Grease!' and 'Harry Potter' - should I pull a Fred & George and just toss a note at someone? Or was it a huge romantic gesture with flowers and a string quartet? Oh, for the love, I was out of my depth...

I met Lily's coppery eyes then and she grinned at me, rolling them at Minho's dramatics in response. I really liked Lily. This was something I had only admitted to myself recently. I really liked her. I didn't act around Lil - I mean, I'd pretty much destroyed any chance of acting 'round her with my soul pouring episode on the first night - but she didn't expect me be strong, or funny or 'Isaac Newton'ish. Whenever we were talking, the conversation never really finished, we just got interrupted by someone, or something and had to shut up. Talking to Lily was nice, it was easy, and there hadn't been a whole lot in my life that was easy.

  
  


Karly paused my wondering by sauntering over to our sofas as Minho tried to defend his vest, swinging her hips in a way that made no anatomical sense to me, with Lily following normally behind her.

"No; I shall continue to wear it in protest! None of you have any fashion sen-"

His words trailed off as Karly perched on the arm of his chair, crossing her legs over his lap and balancing with one manicured hand on his shoulder. I only just managed to stifle a laugh at his sudden change of colour and I heard Lily's soft 'Pffft' behind me. Minho didn't bother finishing his sentence as Karly ran her fingers up his arm:

"So, are you going to ask me to this thing, Superman, or not?"

Ugh, and back to the dance. That snapped the smirk right back onto his face, and he shifted in his chair to make sure she got the full force of it as he replied:

"Playing hard to get, gorgeous - go to the dance with me?"

Karly smacked him round the back of the head, but she had a matching grin.

"Yes, on two conditions. One: call me gorgeous again and I'll smash your teeth in, and two-"

She looked round at the rest of us and counted down on three fingers, so we all answered as one:

"Burn the vest!"

The others dissolved into laughter and I wondered how on earth it could possibly be that easy? He just asked her, Newt, get a grip. I looked across at Lily, who was now sitting astride my arm of the sofa, leaning against the backrest and laughing, her hair slipping out of her red scrunchie and over my shoulder. Should I?

"Budge up, Newton." Lily bumped into my shoulder with her ribcage (the only position she could ever manage it at), I obliged and she slid into the tiny space between me and the sofa arm. "Thanks - how's ABBA going?"

"Bloody awful. I think yesterday's downpour was my fault."

ABBA had become a running joke between the six of us and the others had decided I needed to learn to play 'Mamma Mia' on guitar to take our karaoke to new levels of terrible, but I was a bit rusty on chords and right then, it sounded a lot like a pack of cats crying. But I was so relieved to be talking about something other than the dance, I was happy to own up to it.

"Yeah, I hear Dmitri's got a blocked ear, N, you should probably apologise."

"Maybe I could carry on and unblock it."

"No, honey, I don't think making his ears bleed counts."

"Hey!" I whined, leaning to one side and squashing her into the sofa. She just giggled, her eyes sparkling.

"You started it, Lizard Boy - you know you're pretty good. Seriously, though, how are you? I feel like I haven't seen you in a month."

That was true. I'd spent more time with Lily over the last three months than I'd ever spent with any girl in my life, other than Ma – mostly in snatched moments between classes, before curfew, in breaks and over meals, but still. Exam season, though, had been a wrecking ball through my fragile social skills and I'd basically been a hermit for the last two weeks. I leaned my head back onto her shoulder and sighed:

"Honestly? I'm shattered. I could sleep for a buggin' year about now – Trials, Exams, Cuts, Experiments – I try to go to sleep, and my brain just babbles on about nothing till 2AM. Also, I failed about five of those exams."

"Newt! You didn't…"

"Oh, you didn't see my maths paper – who, for the love, is Pythagorus? There were four questions on a Greek god in a bloody maths paper."

My head was against her neck, so I could feel her muscles shift as she smiled.

"N… Pythagorus was a mathematician, not a god! He invented the Pythagorean formula – you know, 'a2 + b2 = c2'-"

  
  


"No, no, no, no, stop!" I groaned. "I don't actually want to know!"

She chuckled a bit again, before resting her head on top of mine (which for some reason, made me smile), and mumbling: "Ugh, I know what you mean though. At home, I used to read, eat, and sleep. Running up stairs was my limit – this place… this place is intense. We have to be smart and strong and independent and escape from Simulations and climb fake mountains and have friends and go to dances… and ahhhh… people in books make this look so easy."

Just ask her, Newton. Just ask her. Eight words. She's your friend. Just ask her.

"Er, Lily?"

"Mmm-hmm?"

"About that – I was wondering if-"

And then Colby Austin strode into the Common Room, looking stressed with a cry of: "Kids!"

Ugh! Everyone immediately rearranged themselves and sat up straight as the Trial Tutor asked:

"Sorry, guys. Can I just borrow Clinton Williams and Lilianne Pasteur for the primary kids training?" He pulled a face, "There are so many of them - Mr Maddox and I could use some back-up! We're out on the grass field."

Clint, who had been reading a book on the bay windowsill, jumped down, grabbing his coat and beckoned to Lily with a smile. She laughed and muttered, "If Jimmy's been playing tag round Colby again, I swear I'll build a naughty step", before disentangling herself from me (to my disappointment) and standing with Clint. As they turned to leave, Lily looked back at me, her face apologetic.

"Sorry, N, you were gonna say something– I'll see you later, right?"

I nodded and grinned. "Yeah, it – it wasn't important. See ya' later, Tiger-Lily - go be Mary Poppins."

They'd only been gone five minutes, and I'd just picked up my 'Survival for Beginners' textbook, when Benjamin stuck his head around the door, a panicked expression on his face:

"Uh, S.O.S, guys! Susan's broken four of Nick's guitar strings! He's back in twenty minutes – help! Who knows about guitars? Life and death situation here, people! We're gonna be roasted on a spit!"

Five heads swivelled to me and I shoved the textbook back into my rucksack. "I do, Benjy." Sighing, I followed him outside.

It looked like all this dancing-whatsit was going to have to wait.

Later 7:00 PM – Newt's P.O.V

Bloody Hell, I was tired. I'd restrung Nick's guitar in record time, but by the time I got back to the Common Room the others had got restless and they dragged me outside for a football game, in which I got hit by the ball at least seventeen times in ninety minutes. Then, I'd had an afternoon P.E class with Jackson and Mr Aleksandrov in which I'm 98% certain I stretched muscles that I didn't even know existed and, after a dinner of tasteless slush on pasta, I was heading back through the gardens to the doom-rooms, looking forward to sleeping until the 6:00 AM alarm split my skull open. As I passed the main grass field, I heard screeching and the echoes of childish laughter filtering through the fake hedges and trees. In the centre of the field, W.I.C.K.E.D had blown up a huge, grey paddling pool, about five metres wide. Bright, plastic balls were scattered across the surface of the slightly scummy water being batted about by four or five, sleepy under-eights playing a game of 'Piggy in the Middle' as Lily watched, perched on the rim of the pool with a small chestnut-haired boy asleep on her lap. She looked mildly harassed as she balanced, stretching an arm out towards the nearest one and calling something like: Jimmy, come on, we've gotta go in now!", whilst warily trying not to fall in mid-sentence. I decided to play the knight in shining armour and jogged over.

"Hiya, Lil!"

She spun round, somewhat precariously, holding the sleeping child to her chest.

"Oh, you made me jump!"

"They left ya' to play Mommy solo?"

"No, Colby and Clint took most of the others in a while ago – I'm picking up the stragglers before someone falls asleep."

Lily seemed pretty tired herself, running a hand through her dark curls before pulling a towel over another kid's pyjamas.

  
  


"Looks like it could be you or them right now." She smiled at that, "D'ya want a hand? I can carry someone?"

"Oh, please! You're an angel, N." Standing, Lily passed me the sleeping boy – who was lighter than he looked, and couldn't have been more than six or seven. What could W.I.C.K.E.D want with kids this young? – then, utilizing her free hands, she roped the remaining three out and into pyjamas and towels, pressed the button to drain the pool and scooped up a tiny blonde girl who was fast asleep behind the towel rack in a couple of swift moves. Wow.

"Okay guys, line up!" The children scuttled into a muddled row at her words, "Back to the dorms, soldiers, let's go!"

That was obviously something they'd practiced before; sleepy as they were getting, the kids happily marched off: left-right-left through the double doors to the main block and down the corridors towards their dorms. They seemed quite happy to continue their marching with little direction, so Lily and I fell back to talking:

"Did I miss anything? When Clint and I left?"

"Ha! Not unless you count avoiding a vicious game of football that'll stop me walkin' tomorrow missin' anything, then no."

She shuddered, "Ugh, definitely not. Poor baby – were you the goalie?"

"No! That's the thing! I was a buggin' striker; if I was the goalie, I wouldn't be complaining – how does the striker get hit seventeen times?"

"Maybe you're just really really bad at soccer…"

"Thank you for that vote of confidence."

"Seventeen times?"

"Yep."

"I rest my case."

I snorted, giving her that, as we marched past the main hall. Big, violet banners had been strung up outside it with the words: "W.I.C.K.E.D Summer Ball! 3 days to go!" in bright white cursive across them. The voice started up in my head again: Just ask her, Newton. Just ask her. I needed a good moment. As we passed under the banners, Lily pointed to them and asked:

"You excited?"

"About the ball? I don't know – never been to one. Not sure white tie stuff's my thing. You?"

"Me neither; Karly's excited so I've got to at least pretend to be for the next four days."

"Oh yeah – Min's ecstatic, he can't believe she wanted to go with him – he acts tough, but he thought she'd say no."

Lily's eyes widened and she waved her hands in frustration: "Argh! Why?! They'd be great together – and they've been flirting since the train here! Why?!"

"Yes! If he got a girlfriend, I'm pretty sure his ego'd blow up at least three more sizes, but hey, maybe he'd stop babbling about her. But he's been going on and on about what to wear to this thing now, askin' me like I'm gonna have a buggin' clue! All this 'dance' stuff's jackin' my head up, Lil."

She shifted the child in her arms into a new position and frowned, like she was considering something:

"Maybe we should just boycott it. Go sit on the roof and find another window for you to fall through."

I didn't have any arms free to push her with, so I made do with a pout. "Hey! I didn't 'fall through' the first one."

I wasn't about to admit that her plan was way more appealing than standing in a stuffy room in a suit trying to dance and shout at other over-dressed people over a pounding bass for three hours. The only time I'd ever worn a suit was for one of my Mom's award shows back in 2059 - and I was certain I'd hated it.

"Oh wow, Lil, we should go in onesies!"

A huge grin split her face at the idea, a spark lighting in her tired eyes: "I will if you will."

"Only if I get to be the unicorn."

"Aw, honey, you're already a unicorn!"

We arrived at the dorm blocks weak with laughter, assigning different animals to people on the campus as we fielded the small children into the right rooms. Way too quickly, we found ourselves walking down the corridor to Lily's dorm and the voice racked up a few notches: Just ask her, Newton. Just ask her. In the end, she made it easy for me. Lily had just put down her rucksack to find her I.D card, when she suddenly glanced up and said:

"You were going to say something earlier, N, before Colby came in. I never asked you, sorry, what was it?"

"Oh – er – um," Just ask her. "I was just wonderin' if you, er, wanted to go to that dance-thing, um, with me?"

I heard my worst London accent creeping into my voice and cringed internally. Looking down at her expression, I wanted to backtrack five minutes and never say it. Her expression was a painful mix of pity and surprise and her face had flushed four shades darker than five seconds ago.

"Oh, N – I –I can't." She stood up and brushed her hair back from her face, avoiding my eyes. "It's not that I don't want to – I would, I would, really – but, er, we were outside earlier, and Clint asked me. I didn't think that anyone- so, er, I said yes."

"Oh." Of course he did. I mirrored her movements and tossed my fringe back for something to do. Why would she go with you? "Oh. That's great – er, that's fine, don't worry about it, kid."

Weirdly, Lily seemed frustrated, pulling her rucksack back on and twisting her hands around: "Oh, if only you'd – oh, never mind." She bit her lip and stared up at me. "I'm really sorry, N."

She looked so guilty about it – though it was really my fault for being such a bloody coward – that I almost laughed. I shook my head and slipped an arm around her shoulders and gave her an awkward sideways hug.

"Don't worry about it, Lilbug." Grinning, I stepped away and started off down the corridor. "I mean, it's your loss – Clint could never rock a unicorn onesie, he's too alpaca." That earned me a soft laugh as I pushed open the lift. "Night! I really don't mind, Lily!"

And it was only when I finally reached the door to my dorm, bruised, messy and exhausted, that I realised what a total lie that was.


	16. Lightbulbs, Lollipops and Really Loud Music

**Chapter 16 – Lightbulbs, Lollipops and Really Loud Music**

Sunday – 6:30 PM – Lily's POV

Honestly, it was getting to the point where I never wanted to see a bottle of hairspray ever again. I had hairspray in my ears, hairspray in my eyes, hairspray in my throat, hairspray in my pores and at least half a bottle in my hair, courtesy of Karly's styling skills – in fact, it was really a wonder that we could still see each other. The air was filled with it, mixed in with perfume, body glitter and yells of "Can you see my bra through this?!", "I look like a chihuahua!", "HAS ANYONE SEEN MY FOUNDATION?!" and "If he tries, should I kiss him?" All of which were answered with a resounding 'NO!"

In films, getting ready for a dance is typically an organised affair – girl goes into her bedroom and emerges looking like a Disney princess – and while I was not quite expecting that level of perfection, I wasn't ready for the scene of devastation that had befallen our dorm room. It looked like a pink, glittery, Maybelline bomb had gone off and I wasn't really sure how to deal with any of those factors… My dress was knee-length and dark blue with a flared skirt and a white waistband, no glitter, no jewels, no ruffles and Karly had watched me struggle with make-up for forty minutes, before announcing that I was 'causing her physical pain' and rescued me, applying a layer of foundation, silver eyeshadow and mascara. When I told her that I could manage lipstick on my own, thank you very much, she cried 'Halle-freaking-lujah!' and went to wait for Minho by the door, whilst stating loudly that she was 'absolutely not waiting for Minho', it was just cooler over there. Obviously, we all believed her. Karly looked stunning; her blonde and navy hair was pulled up in intricate plaits around her head and she wore a black velvet backless dress with a jewelled neckline and a slit up the side that I would never be brave enough to wear on its own, forget the five inch heels she'd paired it with. Her make-up was flawless, with four shades of eyeshadow, deep red lipstick and something called 'contouring'? If you ever find out what that means, please let me know. I'm the twenty-something girl on the top floor of the Serraillier Building with the six-man entourage.

  
  


As someone who'd spent five years in her bedroom, watching everybody get ready was like being at a very sparkly, slightly hysterical zoo: there were girls in form-fitting sheath dresses next to ones in pink meringues who were struggling to get in through doors, girls with 'vampire make-up' (as Winston called it) holding mirrors for the ones smothering body glitter over their cheekbones, girls who had somehow managed to get hold of a bottle of fake tan, girls who were running around yelling about 'how sexy *insert name* will look in a tux' and the ones who were glowering at them from the corners of the room - either in pyjamas pretending to be asleep, or muttering about being 'Sam's third choice! Frigging Sam!" I would have sat there all night, just watching the chaos if Clint and Alby hadn't walked in and demanded my immediate attention.

"Hey, Lily!" Clint bounced over, thrusting a tiny spray of forget-me-nots and silver ribbon at me. "Gordon Bennett, you look gorgeous! D'you have any idea what I'm supposed to do with these things, by the way?"

I laughed, "Aw, thanks - you look very smart. And 'course I don't, Clint - oh, just tie it here-" He wrapped the silver ribbon round my left wrist with a grin. "They're beautiful. If it's wrong, Mariella'll tell me."

Clint did look smart actually; he'd obviously NetBlocked his outfit beforehand and was dressed in a traditional black suit and tie, with a white shirt buttoned up to the neck, and his usual mess of dark hair was slicked back with gel that he'd borrowed from someone (my money's on Jackson). I remember thinking, as I looked at his hair, that he looked more like a cartoon penguin than an alpaca - I'd have to tell Newt. Clint looked textbook perfect and I felt at least six pairs of eyes watching us as we stood by the door. Beth particularly, wearing a long green velvet dress that made her auburn hair look like a sunset, kept sneaking glances our way, to the point that I eventually pulled Clint back into a corner, feeling slightly uncomfortable. Why was she looking at me? Beth was Newt's date that night - he'd asked her out the day before - had he told her I'd turned him down? This paranoia and guilt (and frankly, jealousy) immediately slid into other questions that I didn't have an answer for: Does she really like him? What if he likes her? What does it matter to you if he likes her, Lily, it's none of your business. What are you going to say to him? What makes you think he'll speak to you - you embarrassed him! What if- Stop it, Lilianne Pasteur. You are pathetic.

Alby and Harriet were an adorable distraction from the argument I was having with myself; Harri had ditched the traditional dress for a khaki coloured jumpsuit, ankle boots and perfect black eyeliner - she looked amazing - and although Al wasn't jumping around with excitement like Clint, he was standing just behind Harriet with a look of pride that would have melted even Crazy Mr Mathewson's heart.

  
  


Gradually, other boys trickled into the room to find their dates, dressed with varying degrees of success: Jackson and Olly waltzed in 'fashionably early', despite the fact they had no dates to pick up from Girl's Block, looking like the teenage Neil Patrick Harris and David Burtka and immediately ran over to us, Jax already talking at a million miles an hour as he reached up to rearrange the bobby pins in my hair. Olly stood a couple of paces behind his boyfriend, laughing at Jackson's effusive enthusiasm for the ball (as great as Ol looked, I was willing to bet he'd rather be in bed with a book). Axel charged in at one point in a shirt at least three sizes too small for him, lifted Isla up over his head (just to show that he could still ooze testosterone in a suit, with a shirt cutting off the blood supply to his arms) and promptly started doing laps of the room to show off his date. Poor Emmie's date, Frankie, initially came in wearing a tracksuit - which he tried to argue because it was black – but Jax was so horrified by this fashion atrocity that he hustled Frankie out of the room and back up to Boy's Block to rectify the situation immediately, with the rest of us distracting Emmie by fussing with the flowers in her hair. In the end, I was so busy faffing with the others that I didn't realise that Newt and Minho had walked in 'till I heard a voice behind me:

"Woah! I'm blinded!' Minho was standing behind me with Karly, Newt and Beth, his hands over his eyes, pretending to be dazzled. 'Looking foxy, second-favourite lady!"

Min had truly outdone himself that night – he looked fantastic in a black shirt and suit, dark leather shoes and a white rose he'd pulled from some poor W.I.C.K.E.D worker's window box (no wonder Karly looked smug) – and I couldn't help but laugh, even though something about Beth's hand on Newt's shoulder was making me weirdly uncomfortable.

"I'm flattered, Min. Flowers, huh? I'm impressed."

He flashed me a wicked grin as Karly raised her eyebrows and said:

"Well, he could have taken the thorns off…if I get blood on this dress! But hey, I'm not complaining. The best most guys have offered me is a dirt-cheap pint and a packet of crisps."

  
  


Minho wrapped his arm around her waist, feigning disappointment and exclaimed, "Aw, babe! You should have told me – when we've all finished 'contributing to society', saving the world, yadda yadda yadda, I will buy you the most expensive pint that exists on the planet."

"Thank you for that future symbol of undying affection. Now come on, Superman, I want a drink in the present."

Karly's voice was laced with sarcasm as she led Minho away towards the double doors to the coral-painted corridor. There was a momentary silence as Newt, Clint, Beth and I were left standing in the corner of the dressing room staring awkwardly at each other and, funnily enough (as I learned later), all for entirely different reasons. Then as quickly as it had manifested, the feeling dissipated as Newt smiled at me with almost his usual, crooked megawatt grin as he visibly tried to formulate a sentence.

"You, er-" He rubbed the back of his neck, making his dark blond hair - which was just a few centimetres too long now - stick up over his collar. "You clean up real nice 'n' pretty, Water-Lily.'

For some reason, I felt a sudden blush sweep over my cheeks (not without a sense of faint annoyance – since when do you blush? Pathetic) as I answered his smile with a quiet 'Thanks', quickly stepping forward to straighten his collar in the hope that he wouldn't notice. Newt looked smart too, although not with Clint's polished appearance, or Minho's suave James Bond attempt, or Jackson's gelled flamboyance. He was wearing a navy suit jacket and a traditional white shirt (although the top button was already undone) and he'd skipped the tie completely and kept running his fingers through his hair to keep it from flopping back into his eyes. As usual, Newt's look was mildly dishevelled and entirely his own and I kicked myself for the hundredth time that afternoon for not staying behind to see what he wanted that day in the Common Room. Beth brought me back to the present with a jolt as she started to laugh:

"Hey, Newton – lucky girl, Pasteur, he only told me I looked 'great'!" The older girl was grinning as she pretended to smack him round the back of the head, and Newt's expression turned sheepish as we started to move towards the corridor.

"Well, you do! Green's your colour! Just be grateful I'm not a serial flatterer like our resident Ladies' Man over there –" He teased, gesturing to Minho who was just strutting into the hall with an arm around Karly. "'Least ya' know I'm not saying that to every breathin' girl, the technician on the fourth floor to weasel out of detention and Mr Maddox's senile cat."

Clint's expression darkened as he fed our tickets into the entry machine. 'Ach, I hate that cat. You know, it earned me a minus score in last week's co-ordination exam? Yeah, okay, don't let the pole touch the walls, but what can I do about it when there's a cat with serious anger issues writhing on my neck?!'

"Not that you're bitter about it, or anything." I patted him on the shoulder in mock reassurance.

  
  


"Nah, 'course not. I'm as chill as a jalapeno in the depths of hell, obviously.'

And, with a laugh, Clint slipped his arm through mine, leading me through the double doors into the hall.

The Canteen was virtually unrecognisable. If you tried really hard, you could still see the occasional squashed grape on the linoleum floor or the dent in the right-hand door from when Sam had the misfortune (or the stupidity) of pointing out that Axel's 'E' in our Sense Test probably didn't stand for 'Excellent', but the cascading floor-length swathes of cream material that were rippling in the breeze from the open door sheathed the general damage incurred by our noisy, emotional, chaotic life so beautifully that some of the people entering the hall gasped. Mariella had strategically placed some carved mirrors on the patio so that the lights from the distant residence halls, the moon and the stars reflected back into the room, creating ever-shifting constellations on the far wall. The benches and tables had been pushed to the edges of the room to create a rectangular dance-floor (which, by this time, was already crowded with candidates trying to morph 'I Am The One and Only' into a love song or an opportunity for a testosterone-off) and, over by the buffet, Siggy had decided to skip the dancing and devote his evening to serving food, much to the relief and appreciation of everyone involved – there was not a cereal packet or a sludge bowl to be seen.

I looked across at Clint, who had frozen in the doorway along with me, his green eyes shining with enthusiasm and I felt a sudden buzz of excitement. Yeah, so there was already a group of idiots materialising on the edge of the dance-floor, trying to trip passers-by, and a soundtrack that came straight from thirty years before the Sun Flares but there was also moonlight and friends and cake and my first ever dance. And I was excited. I was busy following the kaleidoscope pattern of stars on the wall as they attempted to mirror the dancers when I felt a light tap on my shoulder.

"Hey, earth to Lily.' The instrumental version of 'My Heart Will Go On' was fading into the next song and Clint was holding out his hand. "D'you wanna dance or are you trying to calculate the number of dust particles in that moonbeam, in which case, don't let me interrupt. I too am interested in the population distribution of space dust. But, come on, this song is sure boogie gold, you'd be missing out."

The last forty minutes had in no way dulled Clint's fizz - he was almost manic, bouncing up and down at the edge of the dance-floor like an excitable puppy, tapping his feet to the beat that was starting up.

"No worries." I took his hand and let him pull me into the crowd. "They were minor calculations. I save my moonbeam analysis for Min's midnight escapades. Otherwise I might actually start being sane."

The dance-floor was packed and my hand was almost snatched out of Clint's by the twisting mass of bodies around me as we wriggled and ducked our way into the centre, trying to co-ordinate our movements to the erratic beat of 'The Crazy Frog Song'.

  
  


"Boogie gold?" I raised a sceptical eyebrow at Clint, spinning around him in a dangerously uncontrolled spiral that threatened to send me careening into Jackson and Olly. He merely raised an eyebrow of his own in return.

"It's a classic! And you can't deny you know all three words!"

As you may have guessed through our questionable successes in all challenges involving hand-eye co-ordination, Clint and I were not good dance partners. In fact, I think calling whatever we were doing 'dancing' would probably make Fred Astaire turn in his grave. Our method consisted solely of ensuring that all of our limbs were moving at the same time with no bonus points for synchronisation or style. Clint fell over my feet twice as he attempted to breakdance (only saved the second time the by a well-timed collision with Alby) and I slapped him across the face during the YMCA, which ended with both of us lying helpless on the floor, laughing uncontrollably until Stan – resident DJ – screeched at us to get up before we got our fingers shattered, which only made us laugh harder.

A while later, we were perched on a nearby bench, attempting to get our breath (and our self-control) back, 'A Thousand Years' was drifting out of the speakers and all of the couples had gravitated onto the dance-floor accordingly to slow dance to Christina Perri. I wondered vaguely whether Newt and Beth were among them. Leaning back against Clint's shoulder, I noticed Axel and Sam loitering by the frosted bowl of fruit punch, each shifting a suspiciously-coloured W.I.C.K.E.D brand drinks bottle from one hand to the other. Siggy was nowhere to be seen. I dug my elbow into Clint's side and tilted my head towards the table.

"What do you think's in those?" He turned his head and registered the loiterers. Liam Gallagher was quietly crooning his way through 'Wonderwall'.

"Ugh. For a start, definitely 60% of whatever the punch is now made up of."

I spun the image round in my brain. "Raw eggs? Super-concentrated Red Bull? Bleach, à la 1988 Winona Ryder?"

Clint shuddered and shot me a confused look. He wasn't playing. "Gordon Bennett, I hope not! I wouldn't worry, Lil, it's probably just alcohol. Though I have no idea who they had to beat up to get it."

I made an affirmative noise, generally unimpressed by his dull, but probably correct, answer. Then, suddenly, he sprung up from the bench seat, almost making me fall backwards off it and twirled around in front of me, holding both hands out this time, his grey eyes gleaming with mirth. The final bars of 'Wonderwall' had played (i.e. the final reasonable dancing song) and the next song was beginning.

"Listen, Lily – it's 'The Hoedown Throwdown!'"

Newt's P.O.V

I bloody hate dances.

It took all of 0.3 milliseconds for me to decide that as Beth and I entered the jazzed-up Canteen. I know that sounds kinda hypocritical for a guy who dances in 65% of his spare time, but hear me out. The music was too loud, the room was too dark, I was too hot in that stupid shirt and my favourite person was dancing with some other guy, looking like a 1950s movie star. And it wasn't even like the whole thing had started well.

After the humiliation of asking Lily out only to have my self-esteem splintered, I decided to go along with her plan and boycott the whole buggin' thing anyway - I wasn't about to throw myself at unsuspecting girls, like Edward or Sam did, just to protect my 'fragile masculinity' at a dance I didn't even want to go to. But then, on the day before the ball, Beth had slid into the blue plastic chair next to mine at the end of Cartology Class.

"Hey, Newt."

"Hiya, Beth." I smiled at her. I liked Beth – she was smart and funny and I'd worked with her to score a 96 in our Sense test the month before. She left 'The Subject' for a couple of seconds (more than most people in the Training Centre were managing), stretching her map of the Amazon Rainforest out on the table and fiddling with the edges before asking nonchalantly:

"So, you looking forward to the ball tomorrow?"

I made a snorting noise and tried to sound dismissive. "Too much Co-Ordination homework - I'm not goin'."

"Oh – I thought you'd be going with Li-"

"She's going with Clint." I kept my eyes fixed on the fading symbol for a crumbling temple in the bottom left-hand corner of my map. To be honest, part of me was pretty damn irritated with Clint for asking Lily. Come on, how could he not know? I'd only spent fifteen lovin' minutes talking about her motivational speech in Presentation Class two days before, even though her assigned topic was 'Botanical Weaving'. But, while I fully intend to do many novel-worthy things in my life, falling out over a girl who doesn't even like me is not one of them, so I'd squashed the quivery, jealous part and smiled at Clint when he stuck his head into the dorm asking for a tie. Beth was temporarily silent, before saying in a quiet voice:

"So, that's who he asked…"

I threw her a sympathetic glance, which she clearly caught because she tipped her head back over her chair then, her auburn hair almost brushing the chair legs and sighed, crying out dramatically:

"And I'd already picked out my dress! Gosh, I wish I had a friend sweet and sacrificial enough to go with me and spin around so I don't look utterly pathetic…" When I didn't respond immediately, she removed the hand she'd flung across her forehead in mock-distress and smirked at me. "And you know, I could make sure that he doesn't look utterly pathetic and forever alone faking Co-Ordination homework when exams are over…"

  
  


She had me there. I decided to bite. Pushing back my chair, I leapt to my feet and grabbed a ruler off the table, bowing to her with a dramatic flourish and presenting the ruler like a sword.

"Ah, my dear Mademoiselle Elizabeth! I am overcome by the tragedy of your misfortune!" Beth was already laughing as I knelt down and grabbed her hand. "Even the most powerful lure of fake Co-Ordination homework cannot rival your unparalleled beauty and beneficence! Would you save me from my fate of social ineptitude and accompany me to the ball?"

She nodded and accepted the ruler-sword, touching it to both of my shoulders before pulling me up off the floor. "I accept your generous offer, Sir Knight, if only for your extraordinary eloquence – seriously though, Newt, that was pretty good!"

I grinned as we wandered out into the main corridor, heading for the Common Room. "Ha, thanks. I read way too much Shakespeare as a kid – I was a bloody boring nine year old."

And yesterday, commiserating with Beth over our mutual rejection, tonight didn't seem like such a bad idea. This might even be fun! Yesterday me, however, didn't factor in Minho's continual muscle flexing ("This shirt makes me look ripped, right?"), the awful humidity that I'm blaming on excess hair gel and the way the light was reflecting off Lily's hair, turning the chocolate to copper in the twilight, and the way her laughter with Clint was bouncing off the walls into my brain like an army of tiny, invisible cactus spines. This was going to be about as fun as dancing a Charleston over red hot porcupines in a Lycra morph suit with Jedward on repeat.

Whinging aside, the hall actually looked halfway decent – the Art Deco curtains and ceiling lights made it look almost ethereal – and Siggy had done a cracking job with the food (which, coincidentally, was where Beth and I spent more than half of the first hour) and flashed me a thumbs up as we walked into the room. Eventually, I decided that even standing in pairs on the edge of the dance-floor looked pretty pathetic and asked Beth to dance with me. That, at least, was something I could manage without humiliation.

We made our way into the cleared space, which was now covered by a thin layer of glitter and confetti, as 'Wonderwall' started playing and Beth wrapped her arms loosely around my neck. I placed my hands on her waist, acutely aware of the good forty centimetres I'd left between us and concentrated on keeping my hands in exactly the same place as we swayed. The scarlet ribbon on Beth's corsagethat I'd thrown together at 5:30 this morning tickled the back of my neck as I looked down at her. She looked nice. Her hair was arranged around her head like a Grecian princess's, in plaits that looked far more complicated than any knots I'd attempted in Survival Training (respect) and her make-up perfectly matched her fitted green velvet dress that flared out at her ankles, brushing the top of the strapped sandals she wore. I felt suddenly guilty and a bit sad that she was stuck dancing with me, her occasional friend from Cartology Class, rather than the guy she'd waited to ask her.

"Beth?"

"Mmm?"

"I wasn't kiddin' around earlier, ya' know. You do look real lovely. Like a forgotten deity or something."

A smile lit her face at that. "Thanks. But if I'm being a deity, I wanna be one of the weird ones – did you know the Romans had goddesses of understairs cupboards and stuff? Hey – I could be the goddess of cartological origami!" This was the fate that maps Beth deemed too difficult seemed to suffer between lessons. "Or maybe just the goddess of cake. Cake is good."

We turned in a slow circle as I laughed. "Yep – cake is always good. I would definitely spend more time with ya' if you were a goddess of cake."

"You don't look bad yourself, Newton. Except for this –" She ruffled my hair, trying to tuck it behind my ears. "What's going on with this?"

"Oi! I'm on an anti-quiff protest. This is only the first stage." I caught Beth's free hand and spun her around me, crossing my feet quickly to keep my balance. "Next, I plan to confiscate all hair-gel from the boy's bathroom and give it to the deprived. I'm basically Robin Hood but for hair – well, maybe not, 'cause I'm also savin' these lot from their terrible fashion sense. I'm like Robin Hood but better."

  
  


Beth giggled. "What generosity." She wasn't looking directly at me, but at something happening over my shoulder, her gaze shifting there every couple of seconds. Twisting my neck around owl-fashion, I caught sight of Clint and Lily sitting on one of the wooden benches, laughing weakly at something. Lily's eyes were closed and she was leaning back against Clint's shoulder. The quivery, jealous part twisted somewhere in my stomach and I twirled Beth back again, re-establishing the forty centimetres.

"My Lady, I am afraid your attentions have been drawn elsewhere." Beth's eyes darted back to mine, realising I'd rumbled her as I gestured towards Clint. "Under normal circumstances, I would have to challenge this unfortunate gentleman in a duel to the death, however, I fear my current footwear and lack of a ruler-sword would put me at a disadvantage that would be too great to risk. Therefore, I release you from any engagement and will aid you in any and all pursuits of your suitor."

Beth looked towards the couple, who were now dancing as the 'Hoedown Throwdown' (really?), and then at my face, smirking slightly. "I appreciate that greatly, my good man. This 'aid' wouldn't have anything to do with your personal investment in the issue, would it, sir?"

"Absolutely not. How dare you suggest such a thing, madam, I am most affronted." We were both spluttering with laughter at this point and I put an arm around her shoulder to lead her off the floor. When we got there, she touched my arm lightly, looking slightly nervous.

"Do you really think I should go and talk to him, Newt?"

"Yes! I really do." Her face gave me a sudden boost of confidence. "In fact, I'll make it easy for ya'. Hang on a sec."

Before I could properly process what I was doing – specifically before my brain could remind me of what happened last time I tried this – I was striding across the darkening room, weaving between people and tables (you gotta watch out for tables - I'm exactly the wrong height for walking into them. I think I'd rather be shot). I made out Lily's silhouette under one of the disco balls and when I got about five metres away I saw she was laughing with Clint and Jackson, her dark hair falling over her shoulders and I almost spun right around and went straight back. But then she saw me. And her face lit up with a sudden smile and she beckoned me over, calling:

"Hey!"

That was all it took for a grin to split my own face and for my pace to pick up.

"Hey guys." Clint looked perfect. His suit was pressed, his shoes were polished and not a hair was out of place (I ran my fingers through mine hurriedly). He was breathing heavily though and was slightly flushed.

"You okay, Clint?" He nodded and pointed at the dance-floor, drawing a finger across his neck.

"It's the 'Hoedown Throwdown', man. Ach, my god... I wasn't even doing it right!"

"Yeah, I'm more of a 'Macarena' guy myself – less effort."

Lily slipped her arm through mine, and my entire focus narrowed to the warmth of her fingertips. "You know, N, I'm absolutely going to remind you of that the second it plays?"

"Oh please, you won't need to. You'll just be dazzled by my brilliance."

"At the Macarena?"

"At the Macarena."

"Oh-kay." Lily's attention had wandered from the conversation that Jax and Clint were having and her copper eyes were tracing the constellations that Mariella's mirrors were throwing on the walls. I knew what she was seeing. I'd never really seen stars in London, what with all the streetlights, so these reflections were almost a fragment of magic.

"What do you think they are?" I asked.

"Hmmm?" I pulled her back from the inside of her head for a second. "Oh, the patterns? Well… that big one in the middle there is a whirlpool. Look, can you see the whale being pulled into it – that shiny bit there."

"Oh no!"

"No, it's okay – look, all those little bits are stingrays. They're making a rope with their tails to pull him out. What about that one?" I followed her gaze to a cluster of stars just past Siggy's cake stand.

"Um… it's a hedgehog on a skateboard."

"Is it?"

"Mm-hm, do ya' see that bit – yeah? Those are the wheels and there's his little helmet. Then all the tiny spiky bits – ooh, he's doing a 360!"

Lily was leaning into my arm, awarding me artistic licence on that one. Just ask her. Oh, shut your hole, disembodied voice. Not like you helped me out last time.

"Hey…d'ya wanna dance, Lilliput? If you don't mind me stealing your partner, Clint?"

Clint just shook his head with his usual good-natured grin and a "Just bring her back, Newton", but I wasn't looking at him. To my surprise, Lily had craned her neck around to me, her eyes shining and a surprised expression on her face.

"Really? I mean, are you sure? I have all the dancing skills of an inebriated elephant with several left feet."

"First of all, yeah and second of all, I don't believe that." I started leading her over to the floor before anyone could change their mind.

She grabbed my other hand and dug her heels in, dragging me to a stop and looking up at my face (a bit of an effort considering her head was level with my collarbone) with raised eyebrows. "Seriously, N, I really can't dance."

I just pulled her back so Lily stepped in closer to me. "Here." Gently, I placed her right hand on my shoulder and took her left hand in mine, hoping that my palms weren't as sweaty as they felt. "And that's okay – because I really can."

She laughed softly. "Alright then, Backstreet Boy."

Lily was silent for a few minutes before she said, "Was that a Gulliver's Travels reference back there?"

"It was."

For all of my reassurance, Lil wasn't bloody kidding when she said she couldn't dance. Aerosmith had only got through a verse and chorus of 'I Don't Want To Miss A Thing' and she'd already stepped on my toes three times and tripped over first herself and then somebody else – it was a good thing I was holding onto her or she'd have been flat on the floor. And I was pretty sure my shoulder had nail marks in it. I stopped dancing and reluctantly let go of her hands.

"Whoa, hang on a sec, kid."

"Agh, I warned you!" I started to laugh at her stricken expression.

"No – I know, it's fine! But you know what, just stand on my feet, Lilbug, I'll carry ya'."

She sighed, "But I'm heavy."

"I don't care."

For a second, Lily looked like she was going to argue. But then she ran her fingers through her hair, rubbed her eyes and said. "Fine. But if you drop me, Newton…" She let her voice trail ominously off into the threat before kicking off her shoes and wrapping her arms around my neck without any guidance from me and attempted to distribute her weight evenly over my feet. Lily wavered uncertainly when I took the first step back, so I quickly laced my fingers together behind her waist to keep her steady as we swayed. There was no forty centimetres here. I'm not even sure there were four. Lily's arms were wrapped far more tightly than Beth's had been and I'd never been this close to a girl in my life, forget my favourite-person-fullstop and I was no longer completely certain of my lung capacity. Aerosmith had faded into 'I Won't Give Up' by Jason Mraz and I didn't notice until the second verse. On the lyrics 'and even the stars they burn', Lily shifted her chin from where she'd awkwardly balanced it on my shoulder to my chest, so her head was tucked under my chin, resting against my collarbone. I vaguely remember thinking that she smelled like coconut and spices and that I could feel my heart beating against my ribcage like a battering-ram in a Viking siege. I hoped Lily couldn't.

"This okay?" I could feel her voice in vibrations against my chest.

"I'm okay."

And I was. I've never told Lily how many times I relived that moment in the years and the horrors that followed. That, when I felt like the whale in the whirlpool, when the sea-monsters and the Krakens in my head pulled me down and locked me there, this moment was a stingray picking at the lock. That she was. I should tell her that. But all I realised in that moment, dancing in a hall I'd invented revision to escape, that the heat and the noise and the lights and the suit had completely vanished from my mind.

How bloody weird…

Lily's P.O.V

Everything suddenly felt more. The sound of the music, the swirling of the lights, the feeling of Newt's heart hammering under my cheek like the beating of a bird's wings. He'd mentioned something about being too hot. We couldn't have stayed there for more than ten minutes, but it was one of those moments where you enter an alternate universe for a while, where time plays on a loop and you lose all concept of what's going on around you. All concept except for his hands resting the small of my back and the way I could feel every breath he took through the rising and fall of his chest and his breath ruffling my hair. I didn't know it was possible to be so aware of every part of my body, every place that we were touching.

For all my protestations, Newt wasn't kidding around when he said he could dance. Even when we were slow dancing and I was clinging to him like a pathetic limpet in a rough sea, I could feel the muscles in his arms and shoulders shifting to keep me there as he spun and swayed, carrying me around the dance-floor. This became even more obvious when the last slow song finished up and the speakers suddenly blasted the first few bars of 'You Can't Stop The Beat' from Hairspray, making me jump so much that I would have fallen if Newt's laced hands hadn't stopped me. I slipped off his feet and scrabbled around to find my sandals. And stopped. This song was definitely out of my dancing-league, but I wasn't sure I wanted to go back to Clint, who was now chatting to Beth on the sidelines, just yet.

"Hey, Newton?" My voice sounded weirdly breathy. My inner-self raised an eyebrow: being carried by someone else for three dances wore you out, huh? Newt was smiling his easy grin as he raked his fingers through his hair for the millionth time, making it kink out like a duck tail at the front.

"Yeah?"

"You know you said you could dance?"

"Ye-e-s?" The gleam in his eyes was gradually becoming suspicion. I gestured to the speakers, now blasting the opening of the 60s group number.

"Prove it, buster. You dance – I'll be a maypole or something."

Newt snorted with laughter at that one. "What a beautiful analogy."

"You know what I mean – and, I try my best."

"As will I – just don't blame me if it's crap. I've never danced with a lovin' maypole."

I only managed about half a minute as a maypole. Newt threw himself into the dance with his usual effusive enthusiasm that has an irritating way of leaking out of his pores and spreading to everyone else in the vicinity, spinning around me, leaping like a lanky gazelle and grabbing my hands, laughing, until I found myself spinning with him, ineffectually gasping when he picked me up almost over his head in a lift, still spinning again and again and again until the end of the song came and neither of us could see straight, let alone walk.

From our recovery position, crosslegged on the floor, I spotted Axel's drinks bottle abandoned under the buffet table, a few centimetres of the liquid congealing in the bottom. I poked Newt, who was leaning his head back against the nearby wall.

"I forgot to warn you, N - don't drink the punch. I reckon Axel and his cronies spiked it with whatever's in that bottle there."

He opened one eye. "Ugh, that absolute bugger. Nah, I didn't touch it. Looks like a lot went in though."

"What do you think it was?"

Newt didn't miss a beat. "Liquid helium, obviously."

"Oh my gosh, I so want that to be the answer."

"Or maybe modified Mountain Dew, so we all go buggin' crazy, like in 'Be More Chill'? Ooh, or Mountain Dew Red to save us from it, in case W.I.C.K.E.D have engineered us into an alternate universe and Axel's the only one who knows? That'd be weird – maybe Axel is actually a hero in a Neanderthal's letterman jacket?" His eyes were shining now; wild speculation has always been his favourite game.

Not long after that, the digital clock projected onto the right-hand wall of the Canteen clicked over to 20:00 and eight chimes rang out across the room, momentarily freezing the dancers. At the same moment, a side-door opened and five small bodies rocketed across the room towards our gang with cries of 'Oooh', 'so pretty', 'my eyes hurt' and 'Gally, I'm too hot'. The W.I.C.K.E.D workers had let the lower dorm 'babies' in for a few minutes to say goodnight before they trundled off to bed. Winston, Jeff and little Chuck were already in their pyjamas and regulation slippers. Gally hugged me straight away, with a bounce and a yell of:

"Wow, you all look like princesses!"

Minho immediately quipped, "Gee, thanks Gal – I've always wanted to be a princess, it's my lifetime goal!" while Gally shot him a dirty look and brushed some stray glitter off Karly's shoulder.

Winston, strangely, was hiding behind Gally's legs, clutching his blankie up to his face and peering at me from over the top of it, his blue eyes brimming with a suspicion I remembered well from the day we met. I knelt down and shuffled closer, trying to talk around Gally's knees.

"Hi there, Winston. Does blankie like the party?"

"No. He wants Lily. And then he wants a cuddle."

I frowned, "Winnie, it's me – Lily!"

He shook his head emphatically, reaching out and poking the glitter on my face. "My Lily doesn't sparkle."

"She does if she wants to. And look-" I pushed my bracelet back from my wrist and showed him my scar from when I fell out of the trailer on JD's tractor on a trip with my Dad when I was seven. "No-one else has the bumpy hand, do they?"

Winston reached out again and traced the line from my thumb to my wrist with his pinkie finger, up and down, before squealing and knocking me backwards as he jumped into my arms, squeezing me as hard as he could.

For the next twenty minutes we all danced with the 'babies'. This centrally involved everyone holding hands and running as fast as we could in a circle, trying desperately not to fall over (not everyone managed this), which made all of the kids laugh hysterically until tears were rolling down their little faces. Then, when Winston yawned wide enough to fit a small football in his mouth, I scooped him up off the floor and asked, "Do you want to go to bed now?"

Return of the emphatic head shake. "Blankie doesn't want to go to bed. But he would like a lollipop…" He looked hopefully at the buffet table and then back at me. I sighed, like this was causing me immense pain, so he giggled.

"Oh, go on then."

I scooped up a handful of lollipops and handed them out to the kids so they went quietly, tucking one into Gally's chest pocket (even though he tried to pretend he didn't really want one) as he herded them out of the hall like an attentive older brother, muttering things like: 'If you're there in five minutes, you can have a story' and 'You've gotta brush your teeth though, guys, okay?'

And the party went on.

The few hours after that are a bit of a blur (and I didn't even touch the punch). I 'danced' with Nick, Olly, Borro, Jackson, Newt again, Alby, Benjy, Minho and Dmitri. I saw Axel heading my way at one point, swaggering across the floor, and leapt behind a potted plant with Karly until he gave up and asked Mariella. Then, when Minho whisked her away again, I sat down to people-watch, too tired to dance. A lot of people had vacated the dance floor. Borro and Nick were curled on a nearby window-seat talking, their legs tangled together as Nick waved his arms around, obviously explaining something of immense significance as Borro smirked at him. Jackson, for all of his enthusiasm, had fallen asleep on Olly's shoulder in the corner. Olly was reading 'Alice in Wonderland', careful not to jolt Jackson awake each time he turned over a page. I couldn't see Karly anymore in the mass of people, but I knew she'd be fine.

Newt was standing in the middle of a group of people a few metres away; I couldn't hear what he was saying, but his brown eyes were shining as he told some joke, stretching his arms out for emphasis. His effervescence was radiating again, drawing in the people around him even more closely. He reminded me of a lightbulb, standing under beam from the bay windows, bits of glitter caught in his dishevelled hair – he shone so brightly that other people were inexplicably drawn to him, like moths in the late evening. He was always like that, from the moment I met him on that rattling train. And I was finding it harder and harder to resist becoming just another moth to his light.

Eventually the music slowed and the lights came up, the food dwindled and the dancing stopped. People began to drift out of the Canteen back to their dorms, the threat of the 6:00 AM alarm still looming, even in the wake of exams. Newt materialised behind me and wrapped an arm around my shoulder. He was still grinning, even though circles were forming under his eyes.

"Hey, Lil – you know Mr Anderson's baby's over there!" He said this like it was the most exciting thing that had happened since the Sun Flares. "She's so cute. She's wearing a rabbit hat with ears and everythin'. Bloody Hell. So cute. Also – have you seen Min anywhere? I saw him with Gally and the others before they went out, but I haven't seen him since. It's curfew in half an hour."

I shook my head. I hadn't either, and my head was too bleary with sleep and the mishmash of emotions that the last four hours had presented that I couldn't remember where I had last seen him.

"No. I haven't seen Karl either – they're probably waiting in a corridor somewhere. Come on, I'll come with you to look. Use some of your corridor magic, buster."

We were walking along one of the lesser-used corridors, talking about nothing and everything in the way that you do when only half of your brain is still functioning – llamas, the eternal appeal and durability of glitter, the best dog breed on the huggability scale, astrophysics – when a strange thumping noise came from the storage cupboard we were level with, almost sending Newt skittering into me.

"What was that?" I whispered, wondering whether we should open the door. We'd only been here four months, but numerous people had already managed to lock themselves in these cupboards and miss curfew/meals/lessons etc. They were notoriously difficult to open from the inside. Newt smirked across at me.

"Maybe Clint finally went off with Beth in the end – I'm not sure he had much lovin' choice in the matter."

"Maybe… do you think we should open it?"

He got my point then, the sleep-fog in his eyes clearing too. "Ah, I'd forgotten about 'The Secret Cage Cupboard'. Hmm, probably. Whoever's in there, they're gonna miss curfew. And hey, if it's someone bigger than us, we can just run."

I nodded and reached out for the cool metal of the door handle, pushing in the catch and pulling the door open towards me. The sight that greeted us was something that would live behind my eyes for many many months to come. The door swung open to reveal Minho and Karly, in a state of evident entanglement. Karl's shrug lay discarded over a burgundy Hoover and her lipstick was smeared across Min's face. Both looked up at the sudden influx of light and blinked at us, like deer caught in the beam of headlights. My tired brain, however, decided that it could not deal appropriately with that and I screeched into the cupboard, "Curfew in twenty minutes!" and slammed the door shut.

For a few minutes, Newt and I stood in silence outside the cupboard door, staring at each other and then back at the cupboard, both trying not to think about what had apparently resumed behind it. Finally, Newt just muttered:

"Bloody Hell."

"Yep."

"I think I'm scarred."

"I know."

Newt grabbed me by the shoulders, spinning me to face him. "I CAN'T UNSEE THAT!"

After recovering enough from the shock of Minho and Karly making out in the Secret Cage Cupboard, Newt and I had collapsed on a cracked cream leather sofa at the end of my dormitory corridor. It was nice to know that W.I.C.K.E.D had spared no expense to ensure our comfort.

"You know, I think we all saw it coming." Newt mused as he fiddled with the pins in my hair so I didn't have a million to extract when I got back to my room.

"What ? Min and Karl going out? Oh yeah. It was an inevitable."

Newt's fingers stilled in my hair. This was annoying because I liked the feeling of his fingers there more than I was about to admit (much to the disapproval of my past-self).

"You say that a lot."

"What?"

"Inevitables. What do you mean?"

Ah. I didn't really want to go there. But then my mind flashed back to a night in a hospital in our first week here when I'd asked Newt a similar question. I owed him the real answer for all the tens of answers he'd given me. I leaned back a little until he resumed his pin-removal process and then said:

"It was something my Dad used to talk about a lot. Like fate. How much of life is decided for you when you're born? What do you have control over and what will just happen? He used to say that life was a series of inevitables strung together, impossible to avoid, yet all depending on you."

I twisted around to check his expression. Newt's brow was furrowed as he continued working on my hair, his dark eyes focused on me. "And what do you believe in?" he asked.

I swivelled back and thought about it. "I…I believe that you decide who you are. That's the one thing in this whole messed-up, crazy, chaotic world that you do get to decide. Who you are and how other people see you. And I think that creates the inevitables – the things in life that just happen. They happen because of us , so I guess in some way you do decide them. Like, for someone like Axel – no, not even that different, maybe even someone like Nick or Karly or Jax – my inevitables might just be choices. Not even difficult ones. And vice-versa – it's who we are that makes them what they are. But there are things that you can't change – you could jump off a cliff and they still wouldn't change… It's something I thought about a lot after my Dad went missing - in the hours and months and years he left me to think about it. Could I have stopped him going? If I'd noticed? Could I have saved him, kept him there? Or was it an inevitable…Do you see?"

To my surprise, my eyes were burning and no longer with exhaustion. My Dad was behind them again, painful and untouchable in a way he hadn't been for months. Newt swivelled me round to face him then, on some instinct, and to my relief he didn't snort, or laugh, but bit his lip and concentrated, like he was trying to wrestle with my words in his head. After a couple of minutes, he slowly nodded, lacing his fingers through mine – not suggesting, or assuming, but just my friend, just being there when I needed reassurance that life wasn't just one big lonely scream into a void – and said quietly:

"I wish I could meet your Dad. He sounds like a bloody good guy."

He understood.

I didn't have many words left, so I just squeezed his fingers and nodded back. "He is. I wish you could meet him. I hope you do. He'd like you."

We exchanged sad yet hopeful smiles and Newt walked me up to my dorm, never letting go of my hand.


	17. Cuts, Calculus and Cannon Fire

**Chapter 17 – Cuts, Calculus and Cannon Fire**

As usual with W.I.C.K.E.D, the sense of happiness, camaraderie and security created by the Ball lasted for all of nine hours – eight of which we spent asleep. The next morning, an automated message came blaring over the alarm system, just as it had on the day of our first Sub-Station trial:

Beep!

"The time is 6:00, subjects!"

Beep!

"Please report to the dining room in twenty minutes. I repeat, twenty minutes. You will be allocated fifteen minutes for breakfast before reporting to the Lecture Theatre. Attendance is imperative and compulsory."

Despite the unusual message and the hour that I still hadn't got used to, the elusive feeling of security lingered in my brain like the remains of a glittering spider-web, mingling with the memories of Clint's 'dancing', the whirlpool of stars and Newt's laughter brushing the shell of my ear, before the glare of the morning sun from the window opposite my bed cleared it away and it disintegrated in the morning breeze. I swung myself out of the bed, pulling on a T-shirt and rubbing my eyes, opening them to see Karly standing a few feet in front of me. Karl must have come in after I'd fallen asleep the night before, and I was about to make some comment about Minho and Cupboard-Gate when I noticed the slight frown wrinkling her forehead.

"What? What's wrong?" I asked, putting on the rest of my clothes at lightning speed and placing a hand on her shoulder. As she saw me, a look of relief crossed her face before melting back into confusion, and she was about to reply when I suddenly noticed the distinct lack of chaos that had always followed the alarm without fail. The room was almost silent. Harriet was sitting on the bathroom sink whispering to Sonya, Mariella was fiddling with a myriad of eye-shadow brushes and Beth was scrabbling under her bed for something. But Emmie's bed was empty. Susan wasn't perched on the windowsill. The spot where tiny Alexa sat in front of the floor-length mirror, straightening her hair and filling the air with hairspray and chatter was vacant. I don't understand…

"Maybe they just got up earlier than us… I mean, they're probably in the Canteen already?" The strained note in Karly's voice made it a question.

Because of the look on her face and because that was the first time, I just nodded and locked my arm around hers, saying nothing. And as usual, that was all we could do.

Nobody was in the Canteen. Immediately after breakfast, the whole Subject population of the training centre assembled in the White Room. We were greeted by Chancellor Michael who, with a tight smile that became characteristic, congratulated us on passing the first round of the selection process.

"You may have noticed that fifty of your comrades are no longer present. I told you a month ago that these exams meant nothing. I am telling you now to trust nothing you hear. You will suffer badly in the Trials themselves if you do not give your all, all of the time."

Unlike the last time he had spoken here, when whispers had spread across the hall like crackling wildfire, accompanied by some heckling from the bravest of the idiots, the room rang with the same silence we had woken up to, filling our ears as our brains whirled. Almost none of us had been given a choice about arriving here and it appeared now that the only way out was to guarantee our admission to Trials from which words like 'suffer' and Colby's almost 'killed' seemed to emanate. Is this what's left of the world? I thought, taking Karly's hand in mine as my gaze fell on Winston across the room, who was biting his fingernails, on Newt, who was fidgeting, shifting his weight from foot to foot, on Gally, standing tall but twisting his fingers and on Alby, who was absolutely still, his gaze fixed on Chancellor Michael like a laser beam.

They sorted us into our 'Class Sets' then, based on ranking orders taken from an average across all of our tests. The slip of paper I was handed said 'Higher Tier Juniors', putting me in the same set as Alby, Minho, Karly, Clint and Jax. Borro and Nick were both in 'Higher Seniors'. Newt found himself in 'Intermediate' with Gally and Jeff. He'd expected it, but I still saw a flicker of disappointment (and something else – fear? Anger?) cross his face as he opened his. I realised as I stood next to him that even now - when he was stronger, faster, harder than me –we still weren't equals in terms of fate. I still had a home. Somewhere I could go back to – or at least I assumed so, I don't think we ever left America – where was he? If he got Cut, he was 5,000 miles away from a crumbling London flat with a monster inside. I hug-tackled him then without ever explaining why, squeezing until he gasped with laughter, dropping his slip and had to resort to tickling me until I let go.

As we regrouped and left the White Room to go to class, Ava Paige tapped Newt's shoulder and pulled him to one side. She told him that his results were unfortunate and purely the result of the computer system's averaging and the injury that had kept him out of the early tests. His scores were exceptional in anything involving speed or problem-solving, scores that would put him in the upper half of the Higher set immediately, but his strength scores were average for his build and his math papers were just low enough to pull him down a set. She patted his shoulder, in that way that adults always do in a patronising attempt to seem reasonable and told him that all he needed to do to move up would be to improve his strength ranking and pass a second math examination. I think, as one of the only people to be singled out for any comment at all, that made him feel better about it – and more determined. It certainly seemed that way when I squashed onto the sofa next to him that evening, shattered from Mr Mathewson's four-mile obstacle course. He was holding an algebra textbook, which he angled towards me with a smile as I sat down.

"Do ya' see the number under that squiggly thing there, Lil?"

"The square root symbol?"

"Yep – isn't that what I said? So, I just find the number that multiplies by itself to get that?"

"Yeah, that's it! Then you just move the other bits around until you've got the answer."

"Ugh." He pulled a face, wrinkling his nose at the page. "I can't bloody keep it all in my head, it's too – wait, 6! That's the answer, 6! Haha!"

The ear-splitting grin was back and I pulled the textbook out of his unresisting grip and tossed it onto the floor, "Okay then, genius. Now stop and watch X-Men with us. Math will still be there in the morning, honey."

Newt didn't complain, pulling his knees up to his chest and fixing his eyes on the screen, but a few minutes later, as Scott and Jean Gray were flaunting their powers at Wolverine, he tapped me on the shoulder and whispered:

"You'll help me, won't you, Lilby? With the maths? It's just… I don't know what I'll do if I don't…" Newt's voice trailed off, as if he didn't want to say anything else for fear it would make him imagine an 'anything else'.

"'Course I will. We'll all help – seriously, don't worry about it, N. You're good."

He nodded, not entirely convinced, but rested his head on top of mine and whispered, 'Thank you', as an explosion lit up the screen.

And as for those fifty subjects? Even after almost ten years, I have never seen them again.

Newt's determination paid off pretty quickly. He'd spend hours slaving over his upper-body strength, staying in the training rooms with Alby or Minho or Nick or Jackson after classes had finished, sometimes not reappearing until half an hour before curfew. Karly, Clint and I took turns helping him with the extra booklets he'd begged off Dr Turner and he picked it up quickly, copying the formulas out over and over until he could do the questions without any help. In return, Newt learnt a plethora of new songs on the guitar, accommodating our musical whims and Minho's 'Duran Duran' phase in his usual easy way. I loved watching him play. I know that sentence sounds a little weird and vaguely stalker-ish, but if you could see, you'd understand. It was his escape, the way that Karly's was scrapbooking old Vogue editions and Alby's was throwing weights on the training ground. Even if we'd spent the day twining until our hands bled, or wrestling with Mr Aleksandrov's compulsory aerial rope routines, his shoulders would relax and his eyes would shine as his brain wrapped him up in music and good memories, old and new. Even though he claimed he was paying us back for our time, I think there was always a bit of it that was for him too. But whatever the reasoning, the guitar made our evening karaoke sessions noisier, crazier and at least slightly melodic. Everything had calmed down for a while and N was on the right track.

I didn't think for a second that anything could happen over it, but boy, was I wrong.

It was a few weeks after the first Cut had been made. I was sitting on the floor of W.I.C.K.E.D's enormous library – a room that reminded me a little of the library in Beauty and the Beast, if the Beast had a thing for ribbed carpet and laminated covers – surrounded by books on First Aid and South America. I was trying to finish my write-up for my project on Rainforest Survival before I went to tutor Newt for his last math test and had finally reached the conclusion, but I couldn't decide which bandage would be better for a laceration by an unknown botanical species. Clint was, unsurprisingly, getting top marks in all of our First Aid modules, so, dragging myself out from under the blanket of books that had accumulated over the hours I'd been there, I went to find him. I hadn't been able to at first – he wasn't in his usual places: the boys' dorm, the Common Room window-seat, the bench under the oak tree in the garden by the soccer pitches.

Eventually, I remembered he'd said something about going back to the ice-rink on the third sub-level with Jax this afternoon. We'd all gone there as a group the week before because Clint had mentioned that he'd never skated. Both he and I were atrocious, with all of our limbs moving in completely opposite directions and reaffirming Clint's 'Bambi' nickname. I hadn't minded the teasing when Newt had pulled me up from the ice, giving up and skating backwards in front of me around the rink, holding both of my hands in an iron grip before I had chance to lose some teeth to the ice and sending shivers up my arms, but Clint had been a bit off about it, shuffling from the rink to watch for the rest of the night, even when Min offered to teach him. Maybe he wanted to reclaim some of his pride from the others.

  
  


On my way down to the rink, I ran into a harassed-looking Nurse Alcott, who cried "Ah, Lilianne!" and told me that Clint had been on the ice, but he'd been there alone and had slipped, falling into the thin barriers and cutting himself up. She said he'd be 'right as rain', but he'd asked for me when she told him he could bring someone up to the infirmary with him. Only really hearing the part where Clint was hurt, I'd dropped my rucksack in the Common Room and ran up the three flights to the hospital floor. Clint was sitting on the edge of one of the beds, with a nasty-looking graze on his face, cuts up his arm and a bandage on his ankle.

"Hey, Lil." There was a distinctly sheepish expression on his face as he gave me a slight smile. "And before you say anything, I do know how monumentally stupid I am. Thanks for coming."

"No worries, you absolute muppet." He grinned at my use of his word. "Was that right?"

"Ach, yeah, that was right."

Nurse Alcott was also right, he really would be fine – he hadn't seriously damaged anything, other than maybe his pride, and the cuts healed within a few days. He was pretty shaken up though, so I joined him on the bed, talking to him about Ireland and botanical lacerations for a few hours, to distract him from the nurses treating the cuts, until he decided he was okay to go down to the Common Room. On the way out of the hospital, I suddenly caught sight of the red couch that Newt and I had fallen asleep on, the morning after the zombie escapade. Then, with a panicked look at the clock, I remembered. Newt. The exam. Oh god…

It was already 5:30, but I was on free hours anyway, so I helped Clint back to the Common Room, then raced down the four flights to the library floor, guilt filling my stomach like a swarm of lead mosquitoes. The library was almost empty, apart from a small group of juniors gathered by the computers, animating something on NetBlock, and the pile of books I'd collected still spread out on the floor. In the far corner of the library, at the hexagonal desk under the panelled window, was a blond boy, hunched over a pile of textbooks, running his fingers through his hair and biting his lip as he flipped through the pages. I snatched up my math folder and weaved between the tables as fast as possible, out of breath when I reached him.

"N!"

The boy lifted his head from the dusty textbook and turned around to face me.

"Hi." His voice was flat, his expression closed off. To my surprise and horror, I noticed that his eyes were red and the nails of his left hand were bitten down to the quick. He'd obviously been there a while. Minho told me later, with a hard face and a clipped voice, that Newt had passed his strength exam and moved up eight places in the rankings that morning. He'd been bouncing off the walls and ran upstairs to tell me – it was all resting on tomorrow's math test. That was all he needed to do. I've never felt like such a terrible friend in my life.

  
  


I knew this wasn't going to go well when I placed a hand on his shoulder and he immediately shrugged it off. Not unkindly, yet, but he wouldn't let me touch him, waiting for an explanation.

"Gosh, I'm so sorry, N. So so sorry. How's it going? Are you okay? What do you need me to do? I completely forgot, I was going to find Clint-"

"What?" That was the wrong thing to say. The expressionless mask vanished and a frown creased his forehead, hurt and suspicion in his eyes. I stepped forwards, waving my hands in front of me, trying to let him know as quickly as possible that he definitely had the wrong idea.

"Not like that. Nothing like that. I was trying to finish that horrible Survival project-"

Newt huffed air out through his nose, gesturing blindly at the folders on the floor. His words were simultaneously defensive and accusatory. "Which I obviously wouldn't know about, not being in that Set."

"I told you about it last night! Thanks for listening." I didn't like the way our voices were going. "Anyway, I was going to find Clint and Nurse Alcott told me he'd been in an accident on the ice rink."

"Oh." The frown shifted from irritation to concern. "Bloody Hell. Is he okay?"

"Yeah – it was nothing too bad, just a few cuts, but he was upset and he wanted me to stay, so I did, and I – I just lost track of time. I'm sorry."

  
  


The swarm of guilt roiled, working its way up to my chest as I thought about how upset he was. Newt's eyes had hardened again. When he spoke again, his voice was quiet.

"Right. You can go, anyway. It doesn't matter."

"N-"

"Lil, I'm already going to fail the buggin' thing – I said it doesn't matter."

It did. I knew it did. His nails and his eyes and the screwed up paper on the library floor proved that it did.

"It – it can't be that bad. You're good at all of the stuff we've done." I lean across him and look at the tick sheet Ava Paige had drawn out. My heart sank. It was pages long. Even if we spent the next two hours looking at it, I wasn't sure we could make it through this. I just hoped he knew more than he was letting on. "Agh, why didn't you ask the others to help you earlier? Min or Nick or Karl? They'd've sorted it – or come to find me? I'd have come right away."

"Oh right, so this is my fault now?" He whirled on me, pushing his chair back to stand. I'd never found his height intimidating before. The guilt expanded - I didn't have a comeback for that. I should have been here for him.

"No, N, that's not what I-"

"Look, don't try and judge my life when you've never had your own!"

Whoa - what? Uncalled for. I felt my own temper flare up – my life had nothing to do with this – and before I could think about what I was doing, I'd snapped back:

"Your life? What life, exactly? You shut everybody out – every time I think I'm getting somewhere with you, you just pack it all in again like a freaking snail!"

Newt's expression darkened and he gestured towards me and then out towards the pitch, where Clint was refereeing Gally and Jeff's soccer game on the burning concrete. I noted distantly that a wind was picking up outside.

"Well, why d'ya think? People let you down, they cut ya' up every bloody time!" The fact that that was so unreasonable and heartbreaking and wrong, coupled with the noise that was howling in my ears now, only made me angrier. "And what exactly am I supposed to be hiding, Lily? Next to the lovin' universe of purity and truth that you've shared with me, obviously?"

"I don't know, but if that's the way your jacked-up brain works, how can I be sure of anything you've told me? Everything could just be a pack of lies – you could be a middle-class jerk who gets off on feeding sob stories to people, or a delinquent who spent his time graffiti-ing London train lines, or you could just be the son of a deteriorating alcoholic desperate to get out of his waste of a life, because you'll be exactly the same."

  
  


I shouldn't have said that. I want to take it back as soon as the words pass my lips. As soon as the words hit Newt and all of the colour drains out of his face. As soon as his eyes start to blaze and his hands shake. If I could change any small thing that I've done in my twenty-one years of my life, it would be taking that back. It was cruel, unthinking and it hurt him more than I even realised then. But even though it can never be an excuse, I was young and guilty and furious with the boy who was trembling in front of me. The kids in the corner had stopped talking and were watching us with wide eyes. I opened my mouth to apologise, but he cut me off.

"I'm a bleedin' liar?" His voice was breathy and his accent was thicker than it usually seemed. "At least I've told ya' who I am. What the hell do I know about you, and what bloody right do ya' have to sneer at me from your pristine, upper-crust, emotionless high horse, where nothin' real has ever touched you!"

Nothing real. Nothing like the pain of watching my Uncle disappear. Nothing like sleeping with the phone because my cousin Ruby might ring, because she might need us to save her. Nothing like hearing my mother's crying through the thin walls every night for years. Nothing like constantly feeling like I'd failed them, him, somehow, like I hadn't been enough. Nothing like-

"God, I'd rather be a buggin' Crank than live with a spoilt, spineless brat who talks right pretty, but that's all there is! Words. Lies. Bloody hell, no wonder your Dad buggered off, rather than facing the end of his life with you."

Silence. Even the gale outside seemed to be holding its breath. It was like being punched, but not, because I couldn't feel it on my skin, I couldn't see it, but I felt it deeper than that, so sharp that my eyes filled with burning tears, threatening to spill over my face. I don't know what my face looked like. I don't know if I moved at all. In that second, I was completely numb. He had found one of the smallest, darkest boxes locked away in the back of my heart and ripped it open. And I could feel myself bleeding out.

I watched Newt's face contort with sudden horror and he covered his mouth with his hands, stricken, before spasming backwards and forwards, as if he couldn't decide whether or not to reach out for me. I stepped back anyway.

"I didn't mean that. Oh bloody hell, Lily, for the love, I swear I didn't mean that."

"Right." I echoed his words from earlier, my voice not as stable as I wanted. He'd given me time to reload my gun. "Just like you couldn't possibly have meant to screw up Min's plan, or the exams or hurt people I thought were your friends. Not that that can mean that much to you, because a friend would understand that I had to be there for Clint. I didn't have a choice."

"A friend would understand that maybe I needed them too and maybe they'd get that they were wrong!"

"Well, maybe we're not friends then!"

"Maybe we're bloody not!"

Something scraping away at the back of my head whispered that this was stupid and childish, that we might be doing more harm than we could ever fix. Four weeks ago, he'd spun me around a dance-floor amid constellations and laughter as his every heartbeat sounded in my head, and now we were… What were we doing? In one last-ditch attempt, I took a deep breath and lowered my voice.

"Look, N…I'm here now. I'm sorry, I'm sorry for – for everything. I don't know what else I can say." I took a step closer to him. "We've still got a few hours. Do you want me to look at that calculus now?"

  
  


He frowned, like he was thinking about it. "Uh, I don't know…Doesn't Clint need his shoes shinin'? I know you'd much rather be there."

I snapped.

"Oh, for God's sake, Isaac – grow up!" I slammed the folder I was holding back down onto the desk, the sound booming around the deserted library like the echo of cannons. "Get Cut for all I care!"

I spun around, not waiting to see his face, grabbing my rucksack from the floor and running towards the oak-panelled doors, before the scalding tears could burn a hole in my retinas and the pain in my chest could burn through me entirely. I hear his voice as I reach the doors, my shaking hands fumbling with the catch.

"Oh, bloody hell, Lily!"

The doors finally open and I slip through it, screaming through the gap before the doors click shut.

"Go to hell, Newt!"

Sitting alone in my room, hearing the clatter of the others in the Canteen below me and the blizzard starting up outside, the only thing echoing in my head was: How in hell did we get there?

And what have I done?

  
  



	18. Heights, Hugs and Tangled Heads

**Chapter 18 – Heights, Hugs and Tangled Heads**

Newt's P.O.V - Two weeks later

My head was aching like a mother and I could barely keep my eyes open as I waited for Ava Paige's Analysis Machine to spit out my maths paper from a fortnight ago. Processing at W.I.C.K.E.D was slow when it was something they weren't all that fussed about. I'd just slogged my way through a two hour lesson, and Pythagoras, the quadratic formula, circumference of a circle and the bloody matrix formation were all blurring behind my eyes, mingling with all of my normal thoughts and twisting them out of shape. Ugh. I rubbed my eyes, trying to revive the brain cells that had keeled over in the last two hours as the machine whirred in front of me, punching scores into the specifically-engineered paper. Ugh. The whirring eventually cut out, the machine sliding the first half of the paper back for me to take, but another hand got there first, removing the paper in one smooth movement and copying something onto a clipboard.

"Well done, Isaac. 77%. That's just about good enough, I should think." Ava Paige smiled at me, brushing the dust from the machine off the paper before handing it back to me. "You can join the Higher Set on Monday morning once I've updated the systems and the ranking order. Congratulations."

"Thank you, ma'am! Thank you very much!"

Ava flashed me another benevolent smile before gliding back towards her office. "No, no. That was all you, Isaac."

"Ma'am?" She turned.

"My name's Newt."

Another – different – smile. Knowing, somehow.

"Ah. Well, that was all you, Newt." Then she vanished off into her office, leaving me alone in the corridor.

Except it wasn't, was it? Waves of emotion were rushing through me at her words, travelling in different directions, creating strange whirlpools in my head and making my headache five times worse. Part of me was absolutely buzzing to be moving up - I'd tried not to let the others see how pathetic I'd felt, stuck in the lower Set because I couldn't even buggin' count - I was proud; I knew (and felt) the hours I'd put in to get here. Part of me was relieved - if I got Cut, I was probably facing death or madness. I had no family to call. There were only two cities that could be seen from this Centre and I had no idea whether they were quarantined or not and I'd be sixty before I could earn enough for passage to London; I was a lot safer in this Set - or as safe as I could ever be in this rat trap. But some part of me felt hollow. Like nothing was there. Just a space of sucking nothingness, happily settling down in my chest and starting a lovin' family.

  
  


Because the person I most wanted to tell, the person who I thought got it - would get it - more than anyone else, wasn't talking to me. Or I wasn't talking to her. I didn't know who had decided that. But that was the way it was. Because my 2067 self was an idiot.

By the time I'd finished faffing with Ava's machine, dinner was being served in the Canteen. I slipped in late, ducking a disapproving glare from the scientist on duty and slid into the empty space between Minho and Alby, catching their conversation as I did.

"And then Karly said that if I was going to blindly defend him – when it was her friend that freaking stood him up, then-"

"Min." I shook my head at him. I didn't want to talk about this. "I've said a million bloody times, don't jack up your thing with Karly over my thing, alright? It's not about you guys."

Minho just shook his head right back and bumped his shoulder with mine. "No way, brother, if it's your thing, it's our thing. Remember?"

I sighed. I appreciated the gesture, and it was nice to know I had people in my corner – if a few less than two weeks ago – but I really didn't want this to get any worse than it already was, if that was even possible.

"Well, yeah, but drop it, will ya'? You don't know what went down, you can't fight accurately about it, so just drop it."

"But-"

"Minho." Alby kicked him under the table. "He said leave it. And I agree. The whole thing's stupid anyway."

Alby hated the whole situation almost as much as I did. Our whole group had silently split into factions: Karly had done nothing but scowl at me for the last fortnight, and every time she saw Minho, they just seemed to fight about it. I don't know what Lily had told her. Alby – the only person I had told in any detail about what had happened – still thought the whole fight was ridiculous and sat with me to protect me from Minho's continuous yapping, but he'd helped the girls in the fire task on Wednesday without hesitation. Looking back, I should have taken something from that a little earlier than I did. Min had embarrassingly obviously taken my side. The next morning at breakfast, he had told the girls, rather loudly, to find another table. Which sucked. I knew this wasn't a tiff that could blow away overnight, but I'd kinda hoped that being around each other might make something better, ya' know? Because I did want to make it better, didn't I?

  
  


Every social interaction had been awkward and everyone was miserable. Eyes were avoided, conversations were short and quiet and certain detours were taken to avoid colliding with certain people. Clint didn't seem to know what to do with himself. He'd given up and had spent most of his time with Jeff, Jackson and Olly working on a Geography project, but this morning I watched him walk past the table that the girls had taken up and say something to Lily. She'd had her head bent over a textbook, making notes rather than talking to anyone, her hair spilling over the pages and hiding her face. She looked up at Clint's words, giving him a weak-looking smile (having been on the receiving end of her usual ones, I would know the difference) and nodding. Probably arranging their next date, I thought bitterly. A week ago, I'd have said that to Min or Al, but now I was tired. So I didn't. Lily looked like I felt and there was a dark bruise across her left cheekbone. Something in my chest started tugging at me to walk over there and ask how she got it, if she was okay, but… 'Your life? What life exactly?'

So I didn't.

7:30 PM

"Newt, why do dinosaurs have four legs?"

It was my turn to make sure that Dorm 3 were in bed by Curfew and wrestling Winston's pyjama top over his head was proving harder than I thought.

"Not all of 'em do – look at the T-Rex."

"But why do ones with four legs have four?"

"I guess they'd fall over if they had three – put your arm in, Winnie!" He wriggled around like a sleepy caterpillar, almost sticking his right arm through the left hole before I guided it back to its proper position.

"Not if you moved them – if you made a triangle with the legs then they wouldn't fall over."

  
  


"Ya' know what, that is absolutely right – don't forget your big brother when you're a master Dino Designer, 'kay? Now, where are your trousers, kid?"

I had to crawl under Jeff's bed to find the missing pyjamas – and a nasty-looking bedsock – and before I could shuffle backwards all the way, Winston tapped my ankle, quietly asking:

"Why are you sad, Newt?"

"What?" I jerked upwards, banging my head on the bottom of the bed. "I'm not, Winnie. I'm fine."

"Your stories weren't as good. And you weren't doing the voices properly. You always do the voices properly. Is it about Lily?"

I almost collided with the bed again as I tried to angle my neck to get out. "Why would it be about Lily?"

I think I answered too quickly. Winston was looking at me with big eyes as he patted my ankle again.

"Lily read stories yesterday. She was sad too. Her eyes were shiny." Oh. I felt a tiny stab of guilt twisting somewhere in my stomach. "She said she didn't think you wanted to be her friend anymore."

"It's not that, Winston."

"Did you quarrel?"

"Yeah. We quarrelled."

"'Cause of what?"

"Oh – nothin'. Homework." That wasn't actually a lie.

The smaller kid wrinkled his nose. "Well, that's silly. People only quarrel over big things like battles or dead people or chocolate. Have you hugged sorry yet?"

Bloody hell, I missed the times when it was that easy. He was watching me with an expectant expression. "Er – no. Not yet."

Winston folded his little arms and put on his best disapproving face. "Are you sorry?"

'Your pristine, upper-class, emotionless high-horse, where nothin' real has ever touched you!' Amber eyes darkened to mahogany. Trembling lips.

"Yes, I'm sorry."

"Well, if you're sad about her and you're sorry and she's sad about you and she's sorry, why don't you just hug and be friends?"

Winston shook his head at me, like I was the naughty child, and wrapped his arms around my waist for a hug – maybe as a demonstration. I swung him up onto his top bunk and patted his duvet down before turning out the light.

"Night, Winnie."

"Goodnight, Newt!"

I thought about what Winston had said as I yanked my own pyjama top over my head back in Dorm 4. The kid had a point. How long could we let this go on for? I thought about the way Lily had helped me back from the roof that night, listened to my blathering and understood, the way she'd hugged me when we got our Set results, knowing that was what I wanted but would never ask for. I thought about how I would feel if she was Cut, or if I was, if I'd never said anything. As I climbed into bed, ducking as usual to avoid Alby's bunk, I thought about putting on my dressing gown and seeing whether Lil was in the library, like she often was in the evening. But then I thought about 'the son of a deteriorating alcoholic, desperate to get out of his waste of a life, because you'll be exactly the same.' The way that had felt like a betrayal, someone firing a Launcher into my chest, because that was my fear. I'm not scared of much. My one of three. How could she possibly know that? You never said – unlike what she'd told you about - I push the voice back down. It doesn't matter what I said. She should've known.

So I didn't.

7:00 AM

Bloody hell, it was freezing. And for a street-kid from London, that's saying something. Even Borro and Dmitri looked chilly in the morning air of the aerial field behind the facility building. Colby Austin had woken all the boys' dorms early to go and set up the day's task. It wasn't too bad – just a rope balance trial a few metres off the ground, but Colby needed people to make the nets and secure the ropes and Miss Lockhart had volunteered our group (I knew she was going to get us back for the time Edward Fisherman-Knotted her coat strap to the office chair). But I was tired and cold, so I'd started work on the complicated knots securing the nets to the safety poles, aiming to keep my whirring brain off the temperature and the time and everything else that seemed to seep into my consciousness whenever I left it even slightly unoccupied. But then Clint arrived and screwed that up.

"Er- hi, Newt."

"Hi." Clint took hold of the pole next to mine and started twining a length of rope around it. Damn. That meant he was planning on staying for a while. I continue to bend my rope around itself in silence, trying to force it through the second loop of the knot without breaking my fingers off.

"Can I talk to you about something?"

"I can't exactly stop ya'." I attempted a smile. It was not very good. Clint didn't seem to notice. He was frowning and his eyes were fixed on my face with such intensity that it felt like he might burn a hole through my skin any second.

"It's about what happened the other week – and before you say anything, I know I don't know what happened. I just know that I started it."

  
  


I said nothing but shook my head, still fiddling with the knot in my hands, waiting for him to carry on.

"No, Newt, I did. See, I thought I'd go back to the ice rink because – oh, it doesn't matter why I was going. Anyway, I was rubbish, and I slipped, I went straight through the barriers at the side of the rink. I didn't break anything, but I was bleeding like a stuck pig from my head and my arms and I'd done something to my ankle, so I couldn't really get up. A prize idiot, obviously."

Oh. Lily hadn't said it was that bad.

"The Medics came and took me upstairs to the hospital floor, and Nurse Alcott – you know, the nice one with the red hair? – asked me if I was okay and if I wanted anyone to come and sit with me. I didn't know about your thing, I swear, but I felt weird and everything hurt and Lily's good at that stuff-"

I know, I thought. She did it for me.

"So I asked for her. Nurse Alcott went to find her and asked her to come up, so she dropped her stuff and came right away. So, you see-"

"She told me she'd gone lookin' for you about a Survival project and then just started talkin' in the hospital."

The knot had stilled in my hands as Clint shook his head at me.

"She did; that was the only reason she left the library at all, and she did ask me that question in the hospital. But then I asked her to stay – not very bravely actually - because I was bleeding and all of the nurses asked her to stay. And after that Lily helped me back to the Common Room, but it took ages because I couldn't put any weight on that foot, and the nurses were busy with – who was it who fell off the High Wire that day? Zart? I don't know – anyway, she helped me walk back, but she remembered you as we were leaving the hospital and she totally freaked. As we were coming down, Lily grabbed Frankie and asked him to go and tell you where she was and that she'd be there as soon as she could, then spent the rest of the way panicking about you, even though she said she knew you could do it. I'm guessing Frankie forgot."

Clint met my eyes then. "Gordon Bennet, you didn't know any of that."

I coughed, trying to force my face into something resembling a normal expression. "Not really. No, I didn't."

The tiny stab of guilt that I'd felt with Winston the day before opened up a little more, stretching its edges even deeper into me and beginning to feel a little too much like the gaping nothing in my chest. So, it really was a Survival project. And Clint really was hurt. And they had asked her to stay. She'd even tried to let me know. And I'd just turned on her like some full-Gone Crank. Brilliant. Nice one, Newt. While Clint had been talking about Lily, I felt – with some surprise – the quivery, jealous thing pushing back up into my stomach, making me want to snap back at him about all of the times she'd stayed with me. And I'd never had to ask. That if either of us had any feelings about her, or vice versa, then clearly I'd felt that way for longer and could only be a hundred times more sure of it than he was.

  
  


What? I hadn't strayed into this part of my brain for two weeks, or at least not consciously. Why is this bit still here?

Why do you think it is?

But – but we fought! She told me to go to hell!

That's not how it works.

What do you bloody know, disembodied voice? You don't even have a brain.

I'm part of yours. And let's rephrase that, I know how you work.

Hmm. Clint was talking again, so I tried my best to work my way out of my head and hear the words coming out of his mouth.

"So, you see – I don't know what happened afterwards, but I started it, whatever it was. I just thought that if you're going to cut her out and not speak, then you should at least know everything about one of your reasons for it."

His fingers had strayed away from his knot and were twisting around each other. "Ach, I'm sorry, Newt." Clint's eyes were so wide as he looked at me that I pressed my knot together with one hand and reached the other across to push his shoulder lightly.

"Don't worry about it, Clinton. It wasn't your fault – I mean, that's not the only reason we're not talkin' – but, thanks for tellin' me about it. And you're losing your fourth strand there."

As he smiled gratefully and went back to his knot, stopping it from eating his fourth strand, I felt the quivery part teaming up with the disembodied voice and then raising its eyebrows at me. So, what are you gonna do now?

11:30AM - Later That Day

Colby had made us promise to stay behind after the trial to clear up before heading to lunch, so I'd jumped down from the makeshift platform we'd constructed for the trial and started dismantling the thirty pieces of balancing apparatus in the sawdust as the others took off their harnesses. Karly tossed hers at Minho as she slid down from the platform, shouting something to him and I watched a teasing grin appear on his face and relaxed – it couldn't have been anything too derogatory, then. As she moved away, I caught sight of Lily, dithering behind Karly, picking bits of bark out of her ponytail and totally ignoring the part that had fallen out at the front and was hanging in front of her eyes. Her cheeks were flushed from the cold wind and she was shivering a little. Last time we did this, I'd given her my jacket. I wasn't using it now, I could –

She looked up at me. And like every time we'd met each other's eyes after what had happened, I immediately focused my gaze back to the floor and the apparatus equipment, watching her out of the corner of my eye, whilst still having to look like I wasn't looking. Do ya' see why this is buggin' hard? Lily hung her harness on the rack, smiling and quietly thanking Stan who locked it in for her when the clasp was a little too high up, never completely looking away from the sawdust where I was sitting. For a second, a strange expression crossed her face, like a furious debate was raging behind her eyes. I carried on dismantling. She made a decision and started picking her way across the course towards me. I felt my heartbeat picking up, not knowing whether this was what I wanted or exactly what I wanted to avoid, not sure what I was going to say, but sure that I wouldn't ever say anything like what I'd said before, that I wouldn't make this a sequel to the library, not sure whether anything I could say or that she could say could make up for what we'd already said, as she got closer to my spot on the floor. In the end, I didn't have to worry about it. Minho's voice came from the platform above me:

"Oi, Newton! Get up here! The ropes have gone and tangled up in the cables!"

His eyes were on Lily too. I hesitated.

"Come on!"

"Okay- wait a second!" Without glancing backwards, I pulled myself up onto the platform, using the remaining ropes as leverage and trying to position my limbs on the ledge in a way that wouldn't send me careering backwards. I guess I was relieved, in a way; 'If that's the way your jacked-up brain works…everything could just be a pack of lies.' The thought made me shiver.

But I'm so tired. And I want my friend back.

It was only as we were packing the last few ropes away into their compartments that I noticed the bracelet. It was a faded brown leather with a tarnished gold press stud – it blended in with the bark and sawdust of the training ground, so I wasn't that surprised that none of the other guys had noticed it. I raked the bark away and picked it out carefully, laying it across my hand so I could be sure of its owner. Ah- there it is. When I rubbed the bracelet gently with my index finger, a black embossed 'L' emerged from the layer of mud. It was Lily's. I remembered the time she'd told me about it, the night W.I.C.K.E.D had dropped us halfway between the distant cities and the Training Centre and told us to set up camp:

"My dad gave it to me. When I was ten. We'd gone on a camping trip, actually, not far from where we lived, but, when you're ten, every camping trip feels like a Narnia expedition." She'd laughed, but her eyes had been a long way away from our shoddy attempt at a camp.

  
  


"I lost a boot – one of my favourite ones - because I was trying to get Dad's wedding ring out of the mud. He'd taken it off when he was pouring the oil for the fire, but it rolled. I got it, but only after getting stuck ankle-deep in the mud myself. It took my Dad and my Uncle Dan to pull me out, and I was crying because it was my favourite, and when you're ten, that stuff matters. Anyway, after we got home the next day, Dad took the other boot – which I'd thrown in the trash because it was 'useless without the other one'!" Lily had pouted, imitating her smaller self. "And he made this out of it. He carved the 'L' in with a pen knife and leftover machine paint and told me it was a reward for his Birdie's 'undying bravery in the face of leg-eating mud – may I never forget such courage'." Her lips were curved upwards but her eyes were sad. I'd laced my fingers through hers and asked, in an attempt to distract:

"Why's it got an 'L' on it – if Lily wasn't your name before?"

"My real name begins with an 'L'. I like that actually – like W.I.C.K.E.D haven't totally managed to invalidate everything about me."

I remember smiling – I'd seen an opportunity to make her laugh. "What's your name? No, no, let me guess! Luna? Lacey? Lydia? Lucy?"

She shook her head at every guess. "Leah? Laura? Lysistrata?"

Lily had pulled a face at that last one, pushing me with her shoulder. "Ugh, no. You'll never guess it, N."

"Ooh, is it weird? Louisianna? Lettice? Laverne? Ludmilla? Leopoldine?" Shake of the head at every one, although I'd won laughs with a few. "Come on, Tiger-Lily, tell me your weird secret name."

She'd just grinned up at me, the light of the fire reflecting in her hazel eyes. "Nope. I like this game."

I'd followed her around the camp then, wildly guessing until Alby eventually told me to shut my hole, I didn't have a hope. I traced the 'L' with my finger now, realising I hadn't got it right yet. But more than anything, this reminded me of everything Lily had ever told me about her dad, all of her shared memories flooding into my brain:

"He used to say that life was a series of inevitables strung together."

"He'd have loved this stuff – machines, automatons, anything that moved. Dad took the whole engine out of the car once and took it apart, just because I'd asked him whether cars moved by magic. He'd said, yes of course, but that was a secret that I wasn't supposed to know, so other humans had faked it with engines."

"We were inseparable. Mom always knew where he was…until the day she didn't."

"I wish I could meet your dad. He sounds like a bloody good guy." "He was…He'd like you."

"It was a reward for his Birdie's 'undying bravery in the face of leg-eating mud – may I never forget such courage'."

"Could I have stopped him going? If I'd noticed? Could I have saved him, kept him there? Or was it an inevitable…Do you see?"

Then the sucking nothingness spat something back out into my brain. What I'd said about him.

"Bloody hell, no wonder your Dad buggered off, rather than facing the end of his life with you."

Oh my God. I'm not sure whether my brain froze then, or went into overdrive. I'm a monster. I am a monster. How could I have even thought that, forget buggin' say it? Lily was right. I am my father. Oh my God.

"Not so pretty now, are you, you bleedin' freak?"

"I'm a bleedin' liar?"

"Oh you might bloody worship her, boy, but that spineless harpy knows nothing! PATHETIC….COWARD…BRAT!"

"Than live with a spoilt, spineless brat!"

"Who the bloody hell do you think you are?"

"What bloody right do you have?"

"Your mother…she's a bloody coward…you know she is, the useless bitch."

And then I'd used him against her. The one person that was sacred to Lily. The one person that not even W.I.C.K.E.D had been able to touch. One person that might not even be alive. My mind flashed back to Lily's face in the moonlight, the night I'd told her about my family. And I knew, in that second, that I'd have had to slit her father's throat in front of her before she'd have mentioned my mother. My person.

  
  


How can he still hurt me? How is it possible that, 5,000 bloody miles away and four years forgotten, he can still ruin me? Did he break me so badly that it doesn't matter what I try to fix – I'll destroy it anyway?

No. My gaze refocused on the bracelet. On the cold breeze that was chafing my skin until it ached. I wasn't going to let that happen.

9:30PM

Dear Lily,

Before I start, please don't burn this/shred it/screw it up/make it into origami weapons/use it as a dart board or all of the above – not until you've read it, at least. Though I wouldn't blame you if you did. I'm not completely sure that I wouldn't.

I'm sorry.

I know that's pathetic - no two words can even start to make up for the way I was that day – but I'm so sorry.

I don't know how to start this letter. That sounds ridiculous, because I've already started, but I've started with the easiest bit – feeling sorry is easy to spot, easy to say. That doesn't mean I mean it any less. But the reasons why stuff happens – the reasons why people fight, why they try to make up – I can feel them, all tangled up in my brain and my body until all of my muscles are tight and my head aches, but they don't form words. Not even for me – and how can I try to explain the inside of my head to somebody else when it doesn't even make any bloody sense to me? But I've tried. And I think I've managed to get some words out.

First of all: you were right – definitely not in everything you said about me, but in more than I wanted to hear. I do shut people out. I don't even really notice that I'm doing it and it's kind of sad that I don't remember when that became a habit – Ma used to tell me I was the world's worst oversharer, so I can't have been like that forever. I guess I always thought it didn't matter, because the only person I was hurting was myself and I was weirdly okay with that. But you made me realise that's a bloody stupid, selfish opinion; it hurts everyone around me, by association if nothing else, y'know? It's no lovin' excuse, but everyone that's ever been close to me – knowing what makes me tick, what makes me laugh, what makes me scream – has either vanished or used everything they know against me. And that feels like part of me has just stopped existing or shattered in front of my eyes, then cut me up with the shards. Like every piece of myself that I've given to another person has been pulled out of me in the end. And that's terrifying, because what does that leave me with? I guess I shut people out because I'm scared of what will happen if I don't.

But I was the worst type of hypocrite that day, Lily. Because I turned on you and did the one thing that I'm terrified of people doing to me – I took things you'd told me, your favourite things, your favourite people, things that came straight out of your heart rather than your head and I made bullets out of them. And that was so wrong, so unbelievably selfish that I feel sick every time I think about it. I know you did it too – not like I did, but I know you did it too. You saw my face like I saw yours, and that's not who either of us are. But I started it. I made it a fight, rather than apology and apology accepted, which is what it should have been twice, before I jacked it up with my big mouth.

The way I reacted was stupid. Like, lighting a fire in an ice palace stupid and I don't have a good reason for it. It was a lot of little things, I reckon. Yeah okay, you were late and that sucked, but Clint was in hospital and Frankie should have told me about it rather than conking out in the Common Room. I was stressed, I was tired, I felt thick next to you guys anyway, I didn't think I could do the questions and the more I thought about that, the more I couldn't do the questions and then I started thinking about what would happen if I didn't pass the test, if I got Cut from the programme, if I couldn't find my way to a quarantined city – stupid, like I said, but y'know what a slippery slope that brain-path is. So, my brain was already setting itself on fire and then, being honest, Lil, I was jealous.

I know. If this whole thing wasn't so jacked-up I think you'd probably laugh.

I was jealous that you liked spending time with Clint, I was jealous that you went to the Ball with him, I was jealous that he made you laugh and I thought you might be making a point, picking him over me that day and I haven't felt that alone for a while. Stupid, selfish, but that was why. And all of that stuff just built a wall in my head, and even when you tried to speak over it diplomatically, or climb over it or even just Launcher-blast through it, I couldn't get past it. I'd built it too high. Stupid.

Lily, I was scared. I know I'm not supposed to admit that, being a six-foot-tall teenage male, and all that bloody rubbish but there it is. I was scared of people leaving, I was scared of hurting, feeling enough to hurt and I guess, in a way, I was scared of myself. My Pa was a monster. But the longer I stood there fighting with you - the angrier I got - then the more I was like him. And I don't want to be that man. I'd rather die than be that man. Your Dad is amazing – and it says something that I can be so absolutely sure of that having never met him. He must be, because he taught you about the world, about the people in it. I've never met anyone like you in my life, Lil. I've never met anyone who can love people just by looking at them, who can speak to people without making a noise. That's the person I know you are, not whatever rubbish I spouted in the library. I hope to God – if he's still around - with every bone in my body (and my bones are way too long, so it's an extra big hope) that your Dad's okay. And that we can be.

I'm sorry, Lilby. And I forgive you.

Your friend,

N.

p.s. Thank you for leaving me your Maths folder even though I was a prat. Your notes are much better than mine.

p.p.s. Feel free to make origami darts now.

I placed the letter, the bracelet and the folder on the floor outside Lily's dorm, before knocking softly on the blue metal doors and running to the foot of the stairwell just past it. Sonya came out after a couple of seconds, looking confused before calling over her shoulder:

"Lil, there's a ton of your stuff on the floor here!"

She answered quietly, sleep tinging her voice a few shades lower than usual. "Hmm, what? Has someone found my wristband? I'm coming, Sonny."

For a second, I stayed there, watching. Then I turned and sprinted up the stairwell, not waiting to see her open the door.

The Next Morning – 7:00AM

Lily's P.O.V

Today's trial was an enhanced climbing wall and I was not looking forward to it. Karly, Sonya, Harriet and I were standing just outside the Sub-Station doors, struggling to strap on the safety harnesses that had been tossed at us on the way out of the Canteen – I know that's reassuring in theory, but the reality was flimsier than the stuff you'd find at a travelling fairground. The fact that the wall was already visible through the corridor windows – all one hundred feet of it, falling obstacles, shifting footholds and all – might have had something to do with the general aura of unease that was permeating the group that morning. However, it probably had a lot more to do with the clock that had appeared on the far wall of the Canteen.

It looked like a built-in screen with a display similar to the digital clocks on our identical wristwatches – even though that made no sense, because surely we would have heard them knocking an enormous hole into the Canteen walls? But what the display actually read was far more unnerving and inexplicable than its appearance:

731 Days To Go

We'd been held at the doors of the Canteen that morning, so all of the candidates were assembled together, and this forced me closer to the Dorm 4 boys than I'd been for two weeks. Or one of them, to be exact. So, when the doors finally opened and everyone caught sight of the new development, I could hear their reactions as clearly as if they were standing next to me.

"What the hell…" That sounded like Alby.

"Why bother counting from such a massive number? That's more than two years!" I think that was Jax.

"Why doesn't matter, the real question is what the hell are they counting down to?" Minho?

"I don't know, but I'm pretty sure it's not buggin' Christmas." Newt. I spun at the sound of his voice, nervous energy shooting up my arms, but letting us all in at once had a tidal wave effect when people started moving and I couldn't pick him out. It doesn't matter, I thought. I'll find him today.

Now, waiting for the Sub-Station doors to open, my mind flashed back to the letter I'd found last night, tucked inside my Dad's wristband (which I'd been going crazy over losing for six hours) – ever since I'd read it, it had become my mental screensaver. Oh, forget that, Lily, it was that and every tab you had open.

Newt's letter. I felt exactly the way he'd tried to describe – a big ball of tangled feelings with no chance of straightening them out, even for myself. I didn't know what to feel, what I was feeling now. My heart had broken again for that little boy in London and I immediately wanted to hug him and try to explain that I'd never do that to him, never, never. Until I realised that in some ways, I already had – I'd been cruel, using things he'd never told anyone else to try and 'win' something that didn't matter and I couldn't let that slide, even if he was willing to. My head hurt and the mosquito-swarm of guilt had hardened and formed a lead ball in my stomach. I needed to find him. Apologise. Tell him that he was wrong, that I was wrong – nothing I'd said about him was true. He would never be his father. Even now, after everything that happened to my N in the years that followed, I am still absolutely convinced that there is nothing that could have made him even anything close.

Also, jealous? What does that even mean? And jealous of Clint? Clint was my friend – he was funny and smart and the kind of person I wanted around but that was nothing next to… well, whatever I'd felt that first night in the hospital or the night of the ball. Nothing at all.

"B5! Come on, Lilianne, I'd rather not be forty before we get started."

Colby Austin was standing by a now open Sub-Station door with an irritated look on his face, snapping me back to the present. He looked more worn than usual, dark shadows forming under his blue eyes. A silver helmet with 'W.I.C.K.E.D' printed on the side in black capitals was being extended towards me. I put it on, pulling the chin strap tight and scrambling after Karly and the others. I was bouncing up and down on my heels next to them, fidgeting and chewing my lip in a last effort to keep my mind off what we were about to do.

"Cut the crap, Lil, what's going on? It's just a super big wall. We've had a whole lot worse by now, my friend." Karly slipped her hand into mine and grinned, but I couldn't quite return it.

"Nothing. I just don't like these things."

"What, heights? But you were fine with the ropes yesterday - and the roof, and that nasty freaking ice shelf thing the other week?"

"No." I sighed, trying to phrase this in a way that didn't sound pathetic. "I hate climbing walls – I broke my arm falling off one when I was eight."

I hadn't thought about that for a long time, actually. I didn't hate heights – I'd always liked them; the way our flat had been so high up that sometimes the clouds came down in front of the kitchen windows and my Dad made animals out of them over breakfast, the way that you can close your eyes and feel like you're flying or suspended in an alternate dimension, the way that the world is just so much clearer from up in the air. But I had hated that day. I think the pain of the most traumatic thing that had ever happened to me by the age of eight had distorted my recollection a bit, but the memory was boiling hot, 37 degrees at least, so my hands had been slippery with sweat. I'd been doing fine, swinging up the wall at the fairground that came to my town in some summer I didn't really remember, with all the confidence of the annoying monkey in Tarzan, but then about 75% of the way up, I froze. I was small for my age then, and my fingers couldn't do any more than brush the next handhold. I should have come down then, admitting defeat, but my parents were standing below me, calling things like: 'You can do it, Birdie!', 'Just a few more, honey!" and I desperately wanted to reach the top. So I'd jumped. And missed. Normally, that wouldn't have been a problem, but the harness I was in was too big - my arm stuck in one of its holes and my momentum from the failed jump sent me slamming back into the wall before I could get my arm out. My screaming, my mother screaming, my Dad alternating between screaming up to me and at the man operating the fairground, the pain that lanced up my arm and the humiliation and failure of not having even made it to the top and still being in a cast for three months. Not one of my favourite memories, to be honest.

I didn't explain all this to Karly though, so she just wrapped her arm around my shoulders and said, "Aw, come on, girl, you can do this! Nothing to be scared of – just some lumps of plastic – and W.I.C.K.E.D can't horribly maim us, anyway, they need us for their big, scary Trial."

"Firstly, have you ever seen a hundred foot piece of plastic with projectiles falling from it? And secondly, no they don't – not for 731 days, remember? Plenty of time for maiming evidence to disappear!"

Now it was Karl's turn to sigh, rolling her green eyes at me. "Fine. Fair point, sister. But, hey, if you wanna be distracted, look at how stupid Minho looks! He's wearing The Vest again."

So he was. It was just as ugly as the last time I'd seen it – which, after my fight with Newt, when Minho had stopped talking to me ('Bro-Code', Karly explained), had been a while. Some of the boys had already started making their way up the wall and Min had almost finished the first section, swinging himself from one rung to another like a clock pendulum to avoid the rocks that were being thrown out of a jagged opening directly above his head. It did remind me a little of that game I used to play with my cousin…

"Falling Monkeys?"

Karly's eyes lit up as she smirked at her already on-off boyfriend. "Yes! Let's hope he does. My metaphorical money's on fifteen seconds, max."

Min and Karly's relationship seemed to pendulum just as much as Minho was doing now (I wondered at the time whether that was my fault – I can confirm after six years and many break-ups and reconciliations later that it was not). At lunchtime on Thursday, Karly had screamed at Minho that he was an "obstinate prick with the emotional sensitivity of a llama" but by the next morning's trial, they were kissing on the Observation Deck. I didn't pretend to understand.

"So, are you guys still… you know?" I hated that almost all of their spats at the moment seemed to be over Newt and me – even though there wasn't really a 'Newt and me' anymore.

She just tossed her hair (almost entirely blonde now) back over her shoulder with a non-committal noise. "Oh yeah. I mean, he's so far up himself that it's a freaking miracle you can even see him, but he's smart. I like him, Lil."

"I do too." It was true. Minho Park was one of the noisiest individuals I'd ever met in my life, but his heart was in the right place and I'd missed his chatter and endless stream of flirtation lately. I found myself smiling back at Karl, just as Colby was calling her up to the wall. "Just know that if he breaks your heart then I'll break his legs."

Karly tipped her head back and laughed, wrapping her arms around me in a surprise-hug before jogging over to where Colby was waiting. "Good that!" One of Alby's phrases that we'd all picked up. Just as Karl was about to start the trial, she twisted in the harness and yelled back.

"Oh, and Lil?"

"Yeah?"

"He's a really good kisser!"

I almost missed Mr Maddox calling me over to him because I was laughing so hard. I love her. And as I walked over to the older technician, the whole thing suddenly didn't seem as impossible. It was just a climbing wall – how bad could it be?

The answer to that naïve question is bad. Very very bad.

This thought had been building in my mind for the majority of the slog up the climbing wall, as I was burned by both the handholds and the falling debris in the Fire level, covered in dirt from sinking partway into the wall in the Earth sector and almost blown backwards off the wall entirely in the Industrial level, cuts forming on my hands from my grip on the serrated metal poles I was climbing, so the inkling had become absolute certainty by the time I reached the final level.

The level was a physical representation of Chancellor Michael's mantra – never trust your senses – because it looked deceptively easy. I was only two metres from the top of the wall and the protruding hand and footholds were large and brightly-coloured, making them easy to see through the sweat that was pouring down my face and the hair that had fallen loose from my ponytail. I scrambled up onto the first foothold and managed to swing myself over the barrier from the penultimate level by gritting my teeth and ignoring the screaming muscles in my arms. In the final seconds of this false sense of security, I planted my feet and stretched up to the green handhold that would give me the proximity to drag myself onto the Finish Platform and as I did so, two things registered in my mind. My fingertips brushed the rim of the handhold – I couldn't reach - and an ominous click sounded from inside the sector of the wall that I was wrestling with. Damn. I didn't know what that meant but, at W.I.C.K.E.D, it couldn't be good. I stretched again until my shoulder ached and my balance on the foothold below was dangerously uncertain, swaying backwards for a second before throwing myself forward just quickly enough to retain my balance. A bolt of fear shot through me as I looked down then back up to the handhold that I couldn't reach without jumping.

'You can do it, Birdie!" No. Not again. I'll just stay here until – damn, damn, damn. The footholds were moving; the source of the clicking sound. Slowly but surely retracting back into the wall. I guessed I had about thirty seconds before I found another route or came crashing back down to the Sub-Station floor. What now?

"That one. The orange one – quick, now."

My head snapped up. It was Newt. He was leaning over the edge of the Finish Platform, his dark blond hair flopping over his face, gesticulating wildly at a foothold to my right, about a metre away and thirty centimetres higher. I was so surprised that I almost fell straight off the wall anyway – shock, guilt, longing, hope and the remainders of giddying fear slammed into me so quickly that my head spun. N had a strange expression on his face, like he couldn't quite decide whether to smile or not. Does he feel like he has to help me?

"I don't need saving, Newton. There's no dragon." I offered him my best I'm-standing-on-a-receding-bit-of-plastic-but-here's-an-olive-branch-smile.

He cracked then and smiled right back. I was fairly certain I'd never been so relieved. "Sadly. This would be much better with a dragon. But ya' do need to put your foot on that one, Lily. You can do it – just stretch."

I looked across. That orange foothold felt a very long way away. But the purple one under my feet was getting smaller and smaller – I had maybe five seconds.

"Come on, Lil. Hurry!"

Taking a deep breath, I wrapped my hands around the red pole that was moving in above my head, remembering what I'd seen Minho do before the start of the trial, pushing myself off the purple foothold, swinging enough to my left to pendulum back to the right and catch the orange one with my feet. I'd just snagged a red handhold with my fingertips to try to lever myself up onto the platform, when my foot slipped off the orange pole – there must have been some mud left on my shoes from the Earth sector – and I felt that horrible shock of terror that only occurs in moments over which you have precisely no control ricochet through my body. I was about to fall. A hand locked around my wrist, pulling me up the last two metres as I pushed up on the red foothold and then I was on the Finish Platform and breathing hard and I was in Newt's lap with his hands still holding onto my wrists.

"I got ya', Princess."

There was an exceptionally awkward moment where neither of us knew quite what to do, but in the next moment he let go of me and I shuffled backwards, shedding my safety equipment, until both of us were sitting on the platform with our knees pulled up to our chests, looking at each other.

"Look, Lil-"

"Newt, I-"

He stopped and nodded to me. "You – I did enough blatherin' in that letter."

I twisted my fingers around each other; everything I needed to say to him, to make him understand was swirling behind my eyes, pushing to get to the front and I didn't know where to look or where to start. Come on, Lily. I forced my hands to still and looked him in the eyes. They were slightly wary, worried, but warmer than I'd expected.

"Thank you, first. For catching me then – you didn't have to do that."

"Yeah, I did. I'm not gonna leave ya' to break your legs, Lilbug, just 'cause you ticked me off. It ain't nothin'." The watered-down version of his usual smile prompted me to carry on.

"Newt, I'm sorry. You were right in your letter – those words are so small compared to the way I feel about it, but I am and I so want you to believe that. I shouldn't have – well, I shouldn't have done a lot of things, but first, I shouldn't have gone with Clint -"

Newt unwrapped his arms from around his knees and stretched them out towards me, palms up, shaking his head.

"No – I should have come to find ya'."

" –and I should have remembered -"

"I should've understood. It wasn't buggin' rocket science."

"I should have come and told you myself-"

"- I shouldn't have given up like that-"

" – I should never never have said what I did."

"I shouldn't have screamed at ya'."

"Oh, I should have apologised sooner than that."

"I should've let ya'!"

We stopped, laughing uncertainly as we momentarily ran out of 'shouldn't's and 'should's to break down the guilt that the other person had gathered. Newt rested his chin on his knees, his brown eyes fixed on my face as he waited for me to bridge the gulf.

"N..." I sighed, looking out across the enormous room, at the candidates milling around below the wall, wrestling with their harnesses, as the real reason for the carnage of our fight hit me. "We know each other too well and not enough."

He lifted his head at that, frowning, but then nodding slowly, considering. "Yeah. Like we know what hurts, but not how much it does. Not how to fix it. Fast-track to ripping each other's throats out, that one." Another quiet laugh. I had to make him understand.

"Newt. What I said about your father – and you - was so wrong." The smile disappeared. "It was so wrong and you were right when you called me a liar, because that's the worst lie I've ever told. If you only believe one thing that I say to you now, believe that one. What I said was an insensitive lie - you'll never be him."

Newt cast his gaze down to the hexagonal metal grille that formed the platform and I knew that, although this had kept him awake too, he hadn't come to the same conclusion. His voice was just above a whisper as he answered:

"Thank you." He coughed, clearing his throat and carrying on in a voice more like his own. "Me too. I mean – what I said about you and yours was unbelievable. I can't believe you're still even looking at me, forget trying to lovin' apologise yourself. Your Dad adored ya', Lil. I know he did." He lifted his eyes from the floor and locked them with mine with an intensity I'd never felt from him before. "And I swear to you that as soon as we get out of this rat-trap, I will tear towns apart to help you find him. Whatever you want. I swear it."

My eyes were burning again and the boy sitting in front of me blurred around the edges, creating a bizarre watercolour painting with the cold grey of the walls behind us. I'd already forgiven him. I couldn't possibly even try to communicate what his promise meant, so I just shuffled a couple of centimetres closer on the platform and answered: "Thank you. What with?"

"My bare hands, clearly –what else do ya' think we need?" His teasing smirk came into focus as I blinked.

"And what about cities?"

"Ah, depends – I mean, if we're talkin' New York or Washington, yeah, I might need a crossbow or a metal detector or something, but if we're talkin' Newcastle, then I should be good."

God, I've missed you. I felt familiar laughter bubbling up in my chest and I raised a sceptical eyebrow at him. "Okay, Newton, just 'cause you've moved up six places – let's not get ahead of ourselves, buster."

Newt started to chuckle, but then his eyes suddenly lit up as he remembered something. "Yeah, I'm still only eleventh, but that's not all, Lily! I passed the bloody maths test – just." He pulled a face. "77%. Brace yourself, kid – I'll be in all your classes on Monday!"

"What?!" I felt a huge grin split my face. "You're not serious? Oh, well done, well done – what did I tell you?" Now it was my turn to grimace. "Okay, actually, forget exactly what I told you, but oh, I knew you could!"

He rubbed the back of his neck, the way he always did when he was embarrassed, and shook his head. "It was your maths notes that did it. They're miles better than mine - no way could I have managed it without those pastel-themed diagrams!"

I brushed off his joke and leaned across, tentatively resting my hand on his knee. Newt looked up in surprise, which was good, because I wanted him to see my face. "N, my maths notes didn't sit the paper. You are so much better than you think you are."

There was a moment then where neither of us spoke but in the next moment, he placed his hand over mine. The expression on his face was just as strange as the one he'd been wearing when he first called out to me on the climbing wall, albeit a different one.

"Lil…C'mere." Newt lightly wrapped his fingers around my wrist and gently pulled me in his direction. He paused. "Is that okay?"

"I think I can manage 'c'mere.'" Though I'm not sure my entire brain agreed with the sentence that had just come out of my mouth, I closed the gap between us on the platform, twining my arms around Newt's neck as he wrapped his around my waist, pulling me into him and resting his head on top of mine. He was warm and familiar and I was just so glad that I didn't have to pretend I didn't care about everything about this boy anymore that I was only too happy to sit there with our limbs tangled together, squeezing him as tightly as he held me. I don't know how long we stayed in the hug, but after a while I pulled back slightly and said:

"Newt? I mean it, you know. You are nothing like your father."

His arms were still around me and I felt his muscles tense at my words. He didn't answer for a few seconds, and when he did, it was in that same disconcerting whisper that he'd used before.

"I look like him, though."

I pulled back all the way then, so I could see his whole face rather than his chin. "So, you look a bit like your Dad. So what? What was it you told me once? A unicorn looks a bit like a rhino. That doesn't make them the same thing."

Newt made a huffing noise that might have been a laugh and he relaxed, flashing me a ghost of a smile. "Good that."

We sat in silence for a while then, watching the last few candidates struggling up the wall and calling out suggestions when they started flailing around on the footholds. The sun was reaching the midday point – it was warmer in here than it had been, and I hadn't slept that well recently. It was only when Newt nudged me, pointing to an image on one of the observation screens level with us, that I realised my eyes had drifted closed.

"Look at that!" Some of the older candidates including Nick and George were practicing weaponry on the field, firing coloured spray cannons at 'the enemy'. I think it was supposed to be a menacing atmosphere, with each felled teammate branded with the colours of the opposing team, but a breeze was starting up outside, signalling the onset of what would become a storm by tonight, and the coloured dust was mingling in the air, blowing onto team members who had yet to fire their cannons or coating them with the colours of their own team. Turquoise, scarlet, yellow, cerulean dust danced through the air, creating swirling patterns that eddied across the screen, almost entirely obscuring the teams.

"It's beautiful… like fireworks." Newt breathed, his eyes shining. "I always loved those. Even when we lived in the flat, my Ma used to take me outside on New Year's Eve and Bonfire Night like clockwork. We'd watch the firework displays across London and make up all kinds of stories about 'em. I'll never forget what she said to me the one time, not long before – before I left. She said 'Danny, you see those colours? Those are the colours you paint your dreams with, okay? ' I've never forgotten it. Plus, I think its real lovely, don't you? If you can dream like that, then it doesn't matter where ya' are."

I've never forgotten it either. And it was something Newt did without question, something he did before she told him to. He thought in colours like that. At the time, I realised this wasn't just him telling me a story, this was him apologising again – opening up a little more. When I nodded, he leant down and whispered in my ear:

"Forgiven?"

"Forgiven." I twisted around to smile at him as best as I could with his arms still around my shoulders.

"Right back at ya', Piccalilli."

I'm not about to lie – his words had hurt me. More than almost anything I'd heard before back in my sheltered, Southern life, and it took me a long time to forget our fight completely, as I'm sure it did him. But that morning, the universe righted itself a little, so that when Newt asked:

"Well, what do ya' say we get to know each other now? I mean, I like ya', kid, but I'm not sure my heart or my lovin' sanity can take that again."

I just pulled him into another tight hug before pulling him up off the floor and down the coral corridors at top speed, spinning around corners so that we could claim back our rightful spot in the Canteen, putting the group to rights as well as ourselves. About two left turns away, we almost collided with someone striding in the opposite direction, skidding to a halt with gabbled apologies and flushed faces. The someone shook his head, dismissing our apologies and his laser-beam gaze focusing on our hands, still locked together from the run.

I've never seen Alby look so relieved in my life.

  
  



	19. Flash Mobs, Fireworks and Finding Inevitables

**Chapter 19 – Flash Mobs, Fireworks and Finding Inevitables**

A Month Later - December

"What about a Canteen flash mob?"

Minho's eyes were sparkling with enthusiasm as he threw himself into our beanbag circle in the Common Room. I decided that suggestion didn't warrant a response, so just raised an eyebrow as Karly smacked him round the back of the head.

"We could do it carnival-style or something – come on, guys, that would be freaking epic!"

Alby, slouched on the floor, leaning against Clint's raspberry-coloured beanbag, just snorted:

"Yeah, until you stop for a second, Min, and think about how much he'd hate that."

Minho wasn't willing to give his idea up, craning his neck around to me for support. He wasn't getting it. "Nah, Newt loves that stuff – music and dancing and all that – right, Lil?"

"Well, yeah, but not as spontaneous centre-of-attention - I think he'd rather sleep on a bed of fire ants while listening to the Sesame Street soundtrack. Sorry, Min."

Clint was biting his lip, trying to throw out a better suggestion before Minho could carry on embellishing his hypothetical flash mob. "We could just have a movie night, like Nick's birthday – that was fun. We could beg some popcorn kernels off the Canteen people and turn half the lights off."

Minho groaned. "That's gotta be the most boring thing you've ever barked, Clint –so it was fine for Nick's birthday, but Nick's seventeen going on seventy. We watched The Railway Children."

He was quiet for a second, his brow creased in thought before another questionable idea materialised behind his eyelids. "Hey, what if we made a balloon tsunami in the Common Room?"

Nobody hesitated this time: "NO!" And Min just rolled his eyes as Alby muttered:

"You are barred from the suggestion-circle, man, until you suggest something normal like cake or somethin'."

It was two weeks before Newt's birthday and we were taking advantage of Jackson and N's afternoon training with Mr Aleksandrov to come up with a surprise. Obviously, there had been quite a few birthdays at the W.I.C.K.E.D Subject Training Centre by that point, but they'd all been fairly non-descript: leftover cake from the Canteen, a half-hearted chorus of 'Happy Birthday' and an occasional karaoke session. Mariella had held a 'slumber party' in Dorm 2 for her birthday, which was sort of fun, but had ended in eight-year-old Charlie spilling black nail polish over Beth's bed and bursting into tears. Everyone had made an effort for little Chuck's birthday – we'd spent two hours decorating his dorm room with origami animals and balloons and playing twenty-three games of Twister to try and detract his attention from the fact that he was seven years old and away from his mom. But in our little group, N's birthday (his real birthday rather than the one on his ID) was the first and we'd decided to do something that would make up for his last two birthdays which had slipped past in the biting winter of southern England without him even noticing the date. Eventually – after many ridiculous suggestions from Minho and sarcastic put-downs from Alby and Karl – we put together a plan for a surprise party, hiring recruits for the mission when other people drifted into the room as classes ended.

'Surprise party' makes the operation sound relatively simple, but it turned into way more of an undercover mission than I thought, involving a number of 'What are you guys blatherin' about?' 'Oh, nothing!' moments, coded notes with weird drawings on them (which convinced N that Karly was starting a cult when he found one) and – my personal favourite – the time that Alby had to frantically hide a homemade donkey piñata in his clothing when Newt forgot his shoes for training and came back early. Since no boys were (technically) allowed in the girls' dorm room, I was in charge of decorations and spent a ridiculous amount of time and trees cutting out paper chains and streamers, so the space underneath my bed looked a little like a rainbow drank a pot of glitter and then vomited. I was proud of it.

On the day of his birthday, we all pulled the usual surprise-party cliché and pretended not to know what day it was. Newt – in his typical easygoing way, much to Minho's frustration – barely reacted at breakfast, pausing for a second when he came over with his tray as if waiting to see if we'd say anything, but then flashed a smile to hide the pause and pushed Minho along the bench to slide into the spot next to me, already talking away about the Construction Task the boys had to go out on after lunch (which gave us precisely forty-five minutes to set up the Common Room). It made me a little sad that he clearly hadn't expected a reaction – I met Alby's eyes across the table and I saw him almost crack and say something, but he sucked his lips in and pulled an exasperated face, stopping himself but catching N's attention anyway.

"You okay, Al?"

"Oh yeah, yeah!" The older boy faked another grimace, looking down at his breakfast. "Er - surprise pickle."

Later that day

It was 4:00 pm and Karly and I had sprinted around to the Sub-Station lift where the boys were coming back from their Construction Task. The last hour had been hilariously frantic as the other girls from Dorm 2 had decorated the Common Room with the help of the Babies who refused to be left out ("No, you can't put the donkey upside down, Winnie…It doesn't really look better like that, though, does it?") There had been streamers, icing and last minute wrapping-paper for the few presents we'd managed to pull together in the isolated island that was W.I.C.K.E.D flying everywhere, people ducking to avoid being hit with chairs and beanbags that were being rearranged and almost psychedelic lighting as people flicked the overhead lights on and off ("Jeff, we turn the lights off before the surprise, honey"), but by 3:55, we decided it looked good enough and legged it to the lifts.

When the doors opened, Jackson tumbled out first with a dramatic sigh. "That has ruined my cuticles. Destroyed them. I don't think these people understand how long it'll take to reshape that."

He held his left hand up to my face (one of his nail tips had broken off), running his free hand through his hair with a mock-agonised expression as the other boys filed out.

"What were you building?"

Newt stepped around him with Alby, putting a reassuring hand on Jackson's shoulder. "Get yourself nice 'n' calm, Jax, you can borrow the bloody nail clippers. It was a lookout tower, Lil – we had to adapt one of the simulated oak trees on the border to work as a hide-out and a watchtower. It wasn't so bad."

"Not until the vicious simulated owl rocked up anyway." Clint pulled his hair back to display a jagged, angry-looking gash on his forehead a couple of centimetres wide. "That wasn't so fun."

Min appeared then, flashing Karly and I an almost maniacal grin over Newt's shoulder. "And speaking of fun, people…"

"Oh, yeah!" Gally cried, a little too loud, as he suddenly remembered the plan and bounced out of the lift and around in front of us.

"'Oh yeah', what? What's goin' on?" Newt had wrinkled his nose and was looking at the 13-year-old, bewilderment tinging his features.

Realising his mistake, Gally shut his mouth rapidly and glanced at me, hoping I could get him out of this, but I suddenly had nothing until Karly jumped in with:

"They're showing a Harry Potter marathon in the Common Room at five – don't you remember, N? I told you this morning, you idiot. We moved all the beanbags and got snacks while you guys were getting your asses kicked by computerised owls."

"Oh, right – nah, clean forgot. I think I've only seen the fourth one; where Dumbledore starts screaming about the Goblet of Fire?"

"Not in the book!" Clint and I said together as Newt rolled his eyes and laughed.

"Alright, sorry, book nerds. I was a 'Percy Jackson' guy as a kid. Come on then and you can bloody enlighten me in the marathon."

Ha – he bought it. The rest of us shared smug grins as we started off down the corridor, Minho slapping Karly a silent low-five behind his back. Only ten more minutes for us not to blow it. We took all the usual turns through the building - which was almost deserted at this time because all the W.I.C.K.E.D employees were queuing up for dinner in the Canteen – all talking loudly, grilling the boys about their owl-haunted watchtower experience just so nobody else could give the game away, but just as we were two corridors away from the Common Room, everyone suddenly stopped.

Two figures had appeared at the end of the coral-painted corridor, a boy and a girl. They couldn't have been employees – they weren't old enough, and neither of them was wearing the trademark black coat that was compulsory for all non-teaching staff. In fact, they looked about the same age as us, maybe only as old as Gally. The pair were wandering down the corridor in diagonals, seemingly aimless, as they stuck their heads into each doorway and opening that they came across and it was only when they were a couple of metres away, when I could make out their faces and confused expressions that I suddenly recognised them – they were the kids who always watched our Trials (from a window or a platform or a doorway) holding clipboards and whispering but never joined us. Thomas and Teresa. We exchanged confused looks of our own, unsure how to react to the kids, whether they were allowed to react to us at all. When they caught sight of us, they stopped dead – they didn't have clipboards now. A wordless look passed between them, and the boy, with a slight frown, stepped forward. His voice was soft, even though his face betrayed his determination not to look intimidated:

"Um, excuse me? We were wondering if you could tell us where we are?"

I heard Minho laugh behind me and, with his voice dripping with sarcasm, he shot back: "W.I.C.K.E.D. Training Facility. Boiling mouse trap for lab-rat teenagers, full of mad scientists, Middle of Nowhere, USA."

The boy's frown deepened and he automatically took a step back. He was looking at us now with a sense of trepidation, and I was about to ask the poor kid what they wanted to know myself when the girl moved to stand next to him, an accusing gaze levelled at Minho.

"That's not what he meant, and you know it. We just want some help - there's no need to be a prick."

"Well, look at that!" Minho's eyebrows blurred with his hairline as the rest of us burst out laughing. "The minions do speak!"

That was enough – the boy, Thomas, looked like he was about to run and Teresa just looked like she was about to punch Minho in the eye.

"Min, leave off." I pushed his shoulder lightly and smiled at the kids, trying to back-track the situation as much as possible. "Ignore him – you're right, he is a prick. He gets better the more you know him."

"Damn straight." Karly grinned, joining in before Minho wrapped an arm around her waist and pulled her in for a kiss, trying for a movie-style dip that almost smashed her skull into a nearby table, making Karly yelp and slap at his chest. Thomas started to laugh then and even Teresa's lips twitched.

"What d'you want to know?" Clint called from the back of the group. "We'll give you a hand if we can."

Thomas, reassured that Min's bark was worse than his bite, re-took the step. "Well, we were delivering a report to one of the offices on the other side of the building – one of the operatives took us over there, so that was fine – but then she went on her dinner break, so we had to make our own way back to our quarters. I mean, we know the way, but…"

He looked across at Teresa, who carried on. "We've never seen this part of the building – only on digital maps – so we thought it might be interesting to come back through your halls instead and see where you live, because we're always on our own, but the 'never seen this part of the building' bit tripped us up and now we're totally lost. All the corridors look the same."

"Tell us about it!" Newt said. "You wouldn't buggin' believe the first day we had." He stopped then, like something had suddenly occurred to him. "Hey, have you two actually seen where we live? Have you got to meet any of us?"

The pair shook their heads and Thomas answered. "No, you guys are the first – we were going to walk past the Common Room area but we took a wrong turn somewhere. We're actually pretty glad to see you, 'cause it means we haven't stumbled into the 'Highly Classified' zone. We'd be so dead if Chancellor Michael caught us there."

We must have looked back at him with matching blank expressions, because Thomas's face coloured and he muttered: "Sorry – probably shouldn't have mentioned that."

As I looked at the two kids in their identical clothes, looking at us like we were simultaneously museum exhibits and wild hyenas about to rip out their throats, I felt a surge of pity. I had no idea what their jobs were, why thirteen-year-olds were reporting to offices and analysing our every move, but it didn't look like much fun, shut up with one other person and who-knows-how-many adults – our lives didn't exactly make sense, but at least we all had each other. So, despite the slightly awkward dramatic irony, I was sort of relieved when N said:

"No worries, kid – 's safe as houses with us. We're on our way to the Common Room now, if you wanna come with? We're all watchin' Harry Potter on the beanbags."

Or not, I thought. At least we weren't lying about snacks – Siggy had been on that one from the first Operation Surprise meeting. Meanwhile, Thomas and Teresa looked completely taken aback – like they hadn't expected the hyenas to invite them to a movie. They did that strange thing again where their eyes met for a few seconds too long, almost like they were having a conversation without speaking.

"Are - are you sure?" Thomas looked at the rest of us for confirmation of Newt's offer. "I mean, we must seem pretty weird to all of you – we weren't sure we'd ever get to talk. You don't have to invite us if you don't want."

"Yes, of course we're sure." Newt shook his head at them. "And we don't hate ya' – be a bit hypocritical when we're all so weird, dont'cha think? Come on, it's gotta be more fun than advanced algebra or whatever the hell they make you do up there. And if ya' get bored, one of us'll escort you back, lady and gentleman." He'd turned on his mega-watt smile now, determined to win them over and inject some element of fun into their evening (even if he had no idea how much). They held out for all of three seconds.

"Okay." Thomas smiled right back. "Thank you."

Teresa nodded. "If you're sure."

"Yes, yes, we're bloody sure. Us lab rats have to stick together, right? Now, hurry up, we're gonna miss the start and then nothin' makes any lovin' sense!"

So, after that unexpected ten minute detour and with two more gang members than we'd started out with, we eventually arrived at the Common Room corridor. Thomas and Teresa had opened up a little more on the way, telling us about the eight years they'd been in the facility for, a bunch of which they'd spent entirely on their own, with just a tutor and some W.I.C.K.E.D operatives for company. No matter how privileged their lives were compared to ours, I decided, I didn't envy them that. Newt was just in the middle of re-enacting his fall in acrobatics last week when we reached the doors of the room.

"I've never been so buggin' embarrassed – oh, that's weird." He frowned at the pitch-black Common Room that greeted us. "There's nobody in-" Newt flipped the lights.

"SURPRISE!"

The room blazed with sudden light, paper lanterns and strings of multicoloured fairy lights turning on as at least thirty of the W.I.C.K.E.D candidates, including Nick, Borro, Beth, Dmitri, Mariella, Stan, Tim, Winston, Harriet, Sonya, Chuck and Jeff jumped out from behind the sofas and the beanbag pile, setting off the party poppers that Nurse Alcott had smuggled in and sending rainbow-coloured string sailing around the room like aeroplane trails.

"HAPPY BIRTHDAY!"

Even if I do say so myself, it really did look great – fine, it was a bit make-shift and very homemade, but we'd turned W.I.C.K.E.D's colourless Common Room utterly upside down in our forty-five minutes and filled it with some of N's favourite people, which really made all the difference. Paper chains had been strung across the room like a kaleidoscopic spider's web, overlapping so much that you almost couldn't see the ceiling, the left-over Signal Balloons from our recent Camping Trial had been blown up and suspended from the chains, Siggy had made a cake and got five candles from goodness-knows-where, we'd cleared the floor in the centre of the room, pushing the tables back and arranging the beanbags in a circle around Alby and Leo's piñata (it was a donkey, it really was, despite Minho's many llama jokes) and the little ones had pulled the stools together for a game of Musical Chairs. We'd dragged all the pillows and blankets from Dorms 2, 4 and 6 and created a blanket-fort/pillow-sea around the beanbags and somehow precariously balanced W.I.C.K.E.D's creaky stereo on the three-legged table by the chairs, wrapping some of the glittering tinsel we'd been allowed for Christmas preparations around the its legs to make it look less like a terrifying trip hazard.

Newt jumped back from the doorway, his hand pressed to his chest, almost landing on top of Thomas, sending him skittering backwards to avoid being flattened. Newt's dark eyes were enormous as he tried to take in the multi-coloured room and all of the people squashed into it.

"What in the..." For once, the ability to speak seemed to have deserted him. "What's all this, guys?"

Winston wriggled his way through the people to the front of the crowd to stand in front of Newt, a red cardboard cone with a yellow pom-pom on in his hands. It had taken him an hour and a scary amount of PVA glue to make.

"It's a surprise party, silly! What else does 'surprise' and people jumping out of cupboards mean?"

A slow smile spread across the older boy's face, like what he was seeing was finally making contact with his brain.

"Well, sometimes a pirate ambush, but yeah – 'course it is." Newt's eyes still weren't entirely fixed on one spot, his gaze darting from decoration to decoration, from face to face. His voice was slightly far away, full of some kind of wonder. "I can't believe I didn't guess first time."

Winston reached up and patted Newt's elbow. "It's your birthday, so that's okay." He pointed at a spot on the floor, indicating that N should sit on it. "But now you must wear the birthday hat. Aren't those the rules, Lily?"

Both boys turned back to me, in the doorway – I had clearly been selected as the font of knowledge in this field. I nodded sagely, waving Newt towards the smaller boy. "Now you must wear the birthday hat."

"Kneel, good sir!" Beth called out from her perch on the turquoise beanbag, her shout making Newt snort with laughter as he got down on his knees in front of Winston, the smile never leaving his face. Winston shuffled forwards with the hat, placing the cone (constructed from a Ready Brek cereal box) on Newt's head, his serious face giving the moment all the reverence of a crowning until he'd balanced it sufficiently and grinned, throwing his arms around Newt's neck and yelling "HAPPY BIRTHDAY!" down his ear – and N just hugged him back and kept on laughing, even when Winston snapped the elastic strap of the hat back against his neck so hard it left a scarlet band across his skin.

"Thanks, Winnie. It's absolutely cracking, kiddo."

Winston jumped back, shaking his head so hard that his dark curls bounced around his face. "T'wasn't my idea – it was them." He pointed back at the six of us, still standing by the door, grinning like Cheshire Cats. "All of it was them!"

N nodded slowly, then stood and spun around, walking back towards us, shaking his head and laughing through his own smile. He stopped again, waiting for a second for his words to come back, but then gave up, reaching out and pulling Minho and I (who were closest) towards him instead. "Oh, just come here, ya' bunch of bloody brilliant nutters."

Everyone packed in for a group hug, even Alby, stretching our arms as far as they could go around the huddle and squeezing as hard as we could until Clint, who was caught in the centre of the tangle of limbs, gasped out: "Gordon Bennett, guys – I can't breathe!"

When Newt pulled back, he whispered: "I can't believe this. I – I thought you forgot, and I wasn't gonna remind ya'! Nobody's ever done this for me – I can't even, agh – " His chestnut-brown eyes were shining now, and not just with surprise, to the point that Min sighed and wrapped an arm around his shoulders:

"Dude, you're welcome, 'kay? We love you, you love us, yadda yadda. I didn't wreck my fingers making freaking paper chains for you to blub all over me!"

Newt covered his eyes with his hands, laughing weakly. "Agh, I'm not, I'm not!" He looked up at us, his expression earnest. "Thank you. All of you."

Tiny, wispy-haired Charlie came running up and tugged on Newt's shirt sleeve. She didn't say anything, because winning words from Charlie was as rare as catching a fairy's voice on a stormy night, just pointed at the chairs she'd helped arrange and flashed a winning smile, proudly displaying the front tooth she'd lost at breakfast the day before. Newt seemed to get the message instantly, clapping his hands together so the crowd turned.

"Alright, everyone – who wants to play a game?"

Everything after that descended into our usual comfortable chaos. The game of Musical Chairs had to be hastily adapted with floor cushions, because the little ones quickly realised their significant vertical disadvantage next to the seventeen-year-olds and tantrums threatened - and that was fine, but did result in people throwing themselves to the floor like they'd been shot every time the radio stopped blasting 'Mamma Mia' and inevitable head-banging, limb-squashing and pillow-fighting soon followed amid shrieks of laughter. Charlie won by teaming up with Newt, who scooped her off the floor every time the music stopped and jumped onto a beanbag like a lanky leapfrog – she was presented with a wooden star that Borro had carved and had immediately skipped off to the sofa with Winston, constructing an elaborate imaginary adventure involving 'Blankie and the Star'.

Thomas and Teresa didn't know what to do with themselves at first, hovering together by the armchairs until Newt spun around to them:

"Okay, so I lied about Harry Potter, but come on in!" When they still looked hesitant, he just sighed and beckoned. "You're not seriously going back? You can't uninvite yourselves from a birthday party!"

They looked at each other, nodded and came in, throwing themselves into Twister with all the enthusiasm of veteran players, but the piñata was by far the funniest game of the evening:

"Permission to give Clint a sympathy handicap!" Nick cried as Alby spun the Irish boy around in circles.

"Granted!" Newt called back. "For the safety of the team! No more spinnin' him, Al, he already looks hammered."

N was right – Alby had only spun him for half of the usual thirty seconds, but Clint wavered around on the spot, clutching the sock-wrapped stick to his chest. "Ach, ye of little faith!"

He staggered forwards holding the stick out at a ninety degree angle and missing the piñata entirely, heading for the stereo table before I caught his shoulders and steered him back around. Leo chuckled:

"We should've have made this five times bigger, Alby! We'll be here all night!"

For all our teasing, Clint actually did manage to land a hit, knocking an ear off the donkey with a cry of triumph and earning a jellybean packet for his effort. But the range of piñata-techniques was impressive – Karly spun the stick around like a baton-twirler in a circus, only catching the tail with the end of the stick, Minho's technique was to jab with his first blow to try to locate the piñata and smash on the second (which would have worked if he hadn't jabbed a Signal Balloon on the first one, then exploded it with a terrific bang), Chuck was just excited to get a go with the stick and clutched it in his hands, spinning in a circle, aiming absolutely nowhere near the piñata but giggling with sheer joy as he spun (we gave him some jellybeans anyway) and I don't think I had a plan at all, trying to stay straight when Alby stopped me and ignoring the misleading shouts from the others telling me to 180 (not that it worked). It was Gally who won the day and basically ran at it, all limbs flailing and I'm not sure whether it worked because of technique, because he caught the string suspending it with the sock-stick or just because everyone else was laughing too hard to walk in a straight line, blindfold or not. Either way, the paper-mache donkey came crashing down, spraying jellybeans and boiled sweets all over the floor.

It was around then, when everyone had made their way over to the food table (which involved an inordinate amount of cake, tea and assorted cereal boxes just for a laugh) that we dragged Newt into a corner of the blanket fort to give him our presents. It wasn't much – W.I.C.K.E.D really wasn't a base intended for any kind of fun and we were miles away from any other form of civilisation for supplies – but Newt reacted like we'd handed him the crown jewels, hug-tackling us one by one as we sat in the circle. Alby had somehow downloaded and printed two books off the NetBlock, one on environmental science survival ("'Cause you're freaking awful at it." "Thanks, man.") and an autobiography of Henry Fox, the aerial skills expert ("'Cause you're not half bad at that, kid"), Karly had managed to weave a guitar strap together in our extra Construction class the week before because N had snapped his when he caught it on Dmitri's bike handle on the training yard. Minho had given Newt a framed picture of himself from September's Camping trip, streaked with the camouflage paint we'd been taught to use and pulling a face at the camera. Newt had initially made up half of the picture, his arms around Minho's shoulders and his head thrown back laughing, but you could only see his head and left arm because "I had to cut most of you out, man, to fit me in the frame – you're so freaking tall". Clint and Jackson had worked together to make a wooden box for him to fit all of the stuff into and painted in Jax's elegant cursive, 'To N, from your favourite pals" on the inside (British spelling and everything). And then it was my turn. I reached into my rucksack and handed him the tiny tissue-wrapped package, about five centimetres wide, making sure he saw my hesitant expression – it suddenly didn't seem like such a good idea compared to the others.

"I –er- I made it, so lower those expectations, buster."

"You made it?" Newt's face lit up as he took the parcel from me. "That's so lovely, Lilby."

I threw my hands out in front of me, shaking my head. "No, no, no, no, no, you don't understand – it started off lovely but now it's the ugliest thing ever, N, I swear. You probably don't want it."

He just laughed at the expression on my face. "Yeah, I do. First of all, you've never seen Minho first thing in the mornin' and second of all, well now I'm just intrigued."

Ignoring Minho's cry of protest and dodging the blow that was aimed at his head, Newt carefully pulled the tissue paper away to reveal a wooden carving hung on a leather strap. The pendant itself was about four centimetres long and was shaped a little like a snake with misshapen ridges along its back, four limbs with toe-like projections coming out of its body and a tail of slightly strange proportions poking out from its rear limbs. The other end was shaped like an arrowhead, with two differently-sized balls formed and painted on top of it for eyes. N turned it over in his hands and ran his index finger across the black-painted 'N' roughly carved into the back of the creature and met my eyes with a gentle smile:

"It's a newt."

I nodded. "Yeah, just about. I don't know - I was thinking, it could be like my wristband. A reminder of a protest or something – like, you decide who you are. You don't have to be Isaac if you don't want to be. But it turned out a bit rubbish."

He stared at it for a few silent seconds, running his fingers over the carving before reaching across and putting the tiny lizard in my palm. "Do the honours then, please, Tiger-Lily."

Newt spun around, angling his back towards me and I placed the leather cord across his collarbone, shuffling across the beanbag sea and brushing his hair out of the way. "You really need to get this cut, N." I tied the cord at the nape of his neck in a double knot, tapping his shoulder as I moved back but before I could, he caught my hand in his, sending a shiver from my fingertips up to my chest, and awkwardly twisting his head around to grin at me.

"I love it, Lil. Bulgy eyes and all. Thank you."

Keeping his hand in mine, I used my grip on his wrist to pull him up off the floor as Karly and Minho shared a smirk that I didn't understand. "Come on then, birthday boy, let's go and get some cake."

By 6:30, everything seemed to be powering down. ABBA was singing 'The Name of The Game' now, rather than 'Dancing Queen' (to which a dance battle had been declared a few hours before that quickly narrowed to Jax and Newt, who spent fifteen minutes trying to 'out-turn' each other, only stopping when they both fell over because they couldn't see straight), most of the food had been devoured, the party games played until even the most enthusiastic player had collapsed onto the beanbags. The Birthday Hat had been used to crown the winner of each game, passed from head to head and had now found a home balancing on the remains of the piñata.

The time was drifting closer to the Junior Curfew and the Babies were flagging. I was lying on a purple beanbag in the corner and Charlie had curled up on top of me to show me the patterns she'd made on her star with bits of party streamer, but she'd quickly fallen asleep with her head in my lap, lulled by the low buzz of chatter and the warmth of the room. Across the beanbag circle, Winston had flopped over Sonya, who stayed where she was, stroking his hair even when Harri called her over, not wanting to wake him up. Even some of the older boys seemed to be going the same way after the day's Construction Task – Clint was curled up on the window seat, reading, his head drooping over the pages and Tim had yawned at least five times in the last minute.

"I think we can say Operation Surprise was a mission success, Agent Tiger."

Karly had slid over onto the beanbag next to me with a sleepy smile. I nodded. "Think we're heading for Special Agent Promotion for exceptional performance, Agent Diana." Karly had demanded to be named after Wonder Woman's alias when we picked Special Agent nicknames.

"Ugh, no way. Over and out, sister. I'm freaking exhausted – at least until Min's birthday in February." She sighed. "Seriously though, I'm glad pulled this one off. Look at his little face."

She gestured over to the far corner where Newt was sandwiched in between Alby and Minho, playing a noisy, clearly emotionally-charged game of Happy Families with Thomas and Jeff.

"Yeah – I can't believe he thought we'd forget. But look at everyone. Everyone looks happy for once, you know?"

And they did. People were lounging in groups around the Common Room, laughing weakly and tossing pillows. Some people were wrapped up in blankets like caterpillars, some people were still perched on stools, finishing what was left of the cake, there was a small group dancing around by the stereo and another attempting complicated balloon animals on the sofa, fairly unsuccessfully, so that every few minutes one would explode with a bang, red rubber shards scattering across the room. There was a real sense of camaraderie about that night, even though we weren't all sitting together, even though nothing dangerous was about to happen, even though we were all half-asleep. It was moments like this that kept us together – not the tests or the variables constructed by W.I.C.K.E.D to win comparable emotions. Not just through the Cuts and the Maze and the Trials themselves, but through everything that came after them. When things were almost worse because there was nobody telling us what to do, when there were soldiers missing from our ranks that we could never replace. These moments and these feelings keep you breathing.

"Hey, Lil."

"Mmm?" My eyes had drifted closed, just listening to the music and the noise, but I felt Karly poke me in the shoulder and opened them again. Karl tapped her wristwatch before gently moving Charlie from my lap onto the beanbag next to her.

"It's twenty to seven. Want me to distract Min?"

Oh. The other half of the plan.

"Yeah, yeah – that'd be great. Thank you."

"No worries, girl – what kind of crappy wingwoman would I be otherwise?" She winked as she pulled herself up off the bag.

"Karl!" I hissed through my teeth, feeling my face flush scarlet. "That is not what this is! I mean – I'm not – he isn't- it is not."

Karly just laughed as she sauntered over to the soccer table in the corner and shouted: "Oi, boys! I bet nobody can beat my winning streak!"

They looked round and Newt shook his head. "Sorry, Karl, I'm no bloody better at that than the real thing. You up, Min?"

"Obviously." Minho stretched his arms out, cracking his knuckles in preparation. "I think I'm the reigning champion actually. Might as well, now I've crushed you weaklings at Happy Families anyway – come on, I demand spectators."

Alby, looking down at his many more families on the table, seemed about to challenge this but decided it wasn't worth the effort and followed Min instead, muttering something about not being about to 'freaking cheerlead.' Newt immediately got up to follow, but stopped when I tapped his arm.

"Oh, hey! You wanna watch with me, Lilbug?"

"No, er – actually, I, um." Oh god - pathetic, pathetic, pathetic. I nodded towards the doors at the other end of the Common Room. "I wanted to show you something, actually."

This part of the plan was an amendment made to Operation Surprise, one known solely by me and Agent Diana and one that I'd only added the week before, when I'd noticed a flyer on the W.I.C.K.E.D Employee notice board in the Canteen for an event in one of the cities we could see from our windows, dated for N's birthday. It was perfect. I could only hope I'd timed it right.

"Oh." He frowned, clearly surprised by this proclamation, but I could see the interest I'd peaked in his eyes. "Okay. Lead the way, Agapanthus."

I wrinkled my nose at him as we slipped out of the main doors and took a left down the first coral corridor. "You what?"

He flashed me a teasing grin. "It's an African Lily. I'm running out of nicknames."

"Well, that one can go right back where it came from, buster, before I start calling you 'Giant Crested'."

That earned me a snort of laughter. "I found one of those once in a pond at school, ya' know. They have orange tummies. I had a thought, by the way – Lorna?"

I shook my head at his guess for the hundredth time. "Nope, miles away."

"Ugh!" Newt pulled a face, flicking his dishevelled hair back out of his eyes. "I'm gonna keep tryin' 'til I guess it but, speaking of miles away, where are we going?"

"That's for me to know, and you to find out." I dived suddenly into another left, making him skid around the corner to keep up. I'd allowed about ten minutes for finding the right corridor, just in case I took a wrong turn and ended up in the Canteen, but in reality we made it in five. When I finally dragged Newt to a bewildered stop, we were standing in the dead end corridor with the metal strips across the walls that Minho had brought the five of us to in our very first week at W.I.C.K.E.D. The corridor was deserted, the offices dark now that working hours had ended and the only sound was the heating system whirring behind the navy blue panels on the walls. Without waiting for N, I swung myself up the ladder at the end of the corridor, twisting the dial until the manhole cover lifted, excited now.

"You coming?"

Newt looked back at me, still frowning, but he echoed my words from the last time we'd stood there. "And I'll live to regret it… Seriously, Lil." He was smirking. "I don't have the slightest bloody clue what we're doing here, but I'm just a bit too tired to face old enemies tonight."

He gestured towards his right ankle and my mind jumped back to the night I'd had to help him down this ladder without us falling and breaking both of our necks as well as his ankle.

"We'll avoid metal grilles. I promise." I stretched out my hand to him. "Please, N. This is my real present, okay?"

Newt's fingers drifted to the wooden pendant I'd fastened around his neck, interest overpowering confusion, and he followed me up the ladder.

6:45 PM

The air outside was cool as it hit my skin, a welcome change from the heat of the corridor. I'd almost forgotten a time before the Sun Flares when going outside in December meant three jumpers and a woolly hat. Neither of us was even wearing a jacket. I mirrored my movements from six months before and reached down, helping Newt pull himself up out of the manhole and onto the roof. And, for a while, not one word passed between us.

If I had thought the corridor was quiet, the roof was absolutely still. Everyone in the compound was holed up in their dorms, Dining Halls and Common Rooms, so there was no movement outside the facility building – none of the noise of cars moving, or engines revving or Bergs taking off that filled the air in the daytime. There were just the lights of the surrounding buildings, glowing yellow as shadowy figures moved behind their curtains, each window telling its own story. No one ever looked up to see the two teenagers on the roof. If you looked beyond the barbed wire of the W.I.C.K.E.D compound, you could make out one of the nearby towns, if only by the smatterings of light scattered by its skyscrapers and the patrol Bergs circling around its messaging tower like moths to a flame, on the lookout for incoming air-traffic or wandering Cranks.

But if you looked beyond that, you could see the stars.

Hundreds and hundreds of them, poured across the sky like glitter on black velvet, a shard of beauty in a shattering world. It was those that froze us in time on the roof; two city kids, polar opposites, one locked in and one forced out – and yet neither of us had seen the stars for an age. I don't know when Newt took my hand. I just know that when I turned to try to convey what was filling my head, his fingers had twined through mine.

"There's Orion." I whispered, almost afraid to break the silence. "That one there?"

Newt's eyes followed my arm to the three stars that formed the hunter's belt, as absorbed as I was. "Yeah – I always liked findin' that on camping trips – you can see his scabbard too, it's so lovin' clear tonight." He reached his own arm out then, pointing a few centimetres lower than I had. "There's the Dog Star – Sirius. Ya' know, that one's so bright you could see it in London?"

N traced the outline of the constellation with his fingertip. I'd never seen that one before. "Wow - and that's the tail there? Haha!" I bounced a little next to him. "I see it! And there are the twins, above it – Gemini, right?"

He nodded, squeezing my fingers gently. "Yeah… They're holdin' hands, ya' see?

Touches like that had seemed to flicker between us again and again recently; hands brushing, a head on a shoulder, a half-hug in the Common Room, hands ruffling hair. All these points of contact somehow.

"I-I see. That's the Big Dipper's over there. Right over the Canteen vents…that's the only one I could ever find as a kid. It drove me absolutely crazy, when Dad took us over the mountain ranges in his truck, because he'd point out Pegasus and the Taurus constellations and all I could ever see was the Big Dipper."

Newt chuckled. "We had a book with them in. I wouldn't worry, Lilbug – Pegasus looked like a square with antennae. And, where? Oh yeah, yeah, found it. Dont'cha think it looks more like a saucepan?"

"I'm not sure 'The Giant Saucepan' sounds quite as good…"

"What, as good as The Big Dipper?" Newt's eyes were sparkling, his voice thick with scepticism.

My lips twitched, however hard I tried not to humour him. "You can't just rename constellations, Newton."

"Why not?" He really did laugh then, an almost wild cry as he let go of my hand, stretching his arms wide and spinning across the rooftop in front of me. "Why the bloody hell not?"

He gestured down to the front entrance of the compound, arms still thrown out in the night air. "If they can rename a bunch of teenagers, why can't we rename the buggin' sky? The Giant Saucepan, A Dancing Giraffe, The Christmas Microwave, The Meerkat Conga Line-" Newt whirled back to me. "I can go on, should I go on?"

I felt a strange sense of euphoria then, pulled along by the current of whatever mental plane the lights and the stars and this boy had built and I found myself spluttering with laughter. "Yes, yes – go on!"

He was moving so quickly that I had to spin in a circle to keep him in my field of vision as he ran circles around me, pointing with total abandon at clusters of stars. "The Robot Nutcracker, The Owl Tapestry, A Mafia Badger, A Juggling Octopus, A Yodelling Swan, A Stripy Armadillo, A – ah – ahaha…"

Eventually, Newt skidded to a stop beside me, breathing hard. "Bloody hell…I feel like I could scream and no-one would hear me." He laughed, his dark eyes bright in the moonlight, scanning the skyline.

"I thought that was what you were afraid of."

He tipped his head back, taking in the vast expanse of sky above us before meeting my eyes.

"It was. But I guess I'm not scared anymore."

Newt suddenly grabbed my hand and pulled me in for a hug, lifting me up off my feet. Vanilla, again. Why does he smell like that? "Aw, Lily – thank you, this is gorgeous. 'S'pose we all forget about it in this prison, but maybe the world'll sort itself out after all, y'know? Reminds me of that."

"Wait, no, N." I wriggled reluctantly out of the hug and moved over to the ventilation ridge built into the edge of the roof that overlooked the town, checking my watch as I did so. 6:58 PM."That isn't what I wanted to show you – more like a necessary side-effect."

"What? What is it then?"

"Come here – you'll find out!"

Newt shook his head, utterly nonplussed, but obeyed orders and folded his legs under himself a few feet away on the ridge, watching me expectantly. Oh, please work. I thought, my gaze darting between him and the town skyline six miles in front of us.

"Right about…" A cobalt spark suddenly shot up from the watchtower of the nearby city, looking every bit like a shooting star except for its vertical trajectory. "Now."

The spark travelled up and up, past the tower blocks and the walls of the town, up and up, until it combusted just above the North wall, fragments of blue glass catapulting into the night, a near-perfect sphere splintering out into total silence. It wasn't until three jets of scarlet colour went wriggling and painting curlicues across the pitch black sky that we heard the pop of the glass-sphere, no louder than the sound of a cork from a bottle. The jets fizzed over the town like flashes of fire, writhing then falling from the sky without exploding, as if the wind had just blown them away. The sound that followed them was a building screech, getting higher and higher before dissolving into silence, chased away by the whistle of the tens of lilac orbs that crowded the sky above the buildings, growing from tiny specks of lavender light and blossoming into enormous amethyst globe thistles among the pinpricks of starlight that already hung there.

"Fireworks…" Newt breathed. I pulled my eyes away from the whirl of technicolour explosions and focused on the boy perched at my side. He was staring at me with a slightly stunned expression, waving his hands around wordlessly in an attempt to convey his feelings as quickly as possible. "You brought me fireworks…how in the world did you know?"

"W.I.C.K.E.D Notice Board – I saw there was a firework display in the main park over there. There's a digital map of the compound on NetBlock, and you can see all the facility's views from it, so I went through them 'til I found one that overlooked the park. I thought you'd want to see."

He nodded, his eyes following the green and amber sparks that were dancing across the horizon like leaves swirling in the wind. "I want to see. Oh, you angel. It's bloody incredible – look at that one there!"

A pale pink bubble of light appeared just above one of the tower blocks, swelling as it grew, the rose colour darkening to a vibrant fuchsia and then to a deep scarlet before it erupted like a firecracker at the top of the messaging tower. "Reminds me of crazy Mr Matthewson when Stan fell over that bloody Simulation tracker in the obstacle course and we all had to go back and start again – or Min when Karly asked him to the dance that time."

Gunmetal sparks flew up into the air like streamers, morphing into orange jets, their high-pitched wails echoing off the metal panels of the W.I.C.K.E.D building seconds later. "Yes! And those ones - me when those stupid maps combusted during the Orienteering Trial up in the mountains. I don't think I've ever made such a weird noise."

"Oh, that was lovin' hilarious." Newt coughed quickly, trying to hide his smirk. "I mean, after Clint found the spare ones, obviously. Not while you were screechin' like a possessed hyena. At all."

I reached across to shove him. "Oi. That one's you then, when Gally tripped you in water-rafting."

A blue rocket was bouncing across the sky in frantic zigzags, almost like it was ricocheting off errant stars. Newt pulled a face. "It was bloody freezing! I've told ya' before, I'm from London, I'm adapted to live in an Arctic environment, but for the love, that lake would have liquidised nitrogen, Lil, I swear it."

"Oh, poor baby." I threw a hand across my forehead in mock-imitation and N pushed me right back. He stayed in that position for a second, his hand resting on my shoulder as he whispered: "Oi yourself."

I looked away suddenly, not entirely sure why I couldn't hold his gaze any longer, what it held that I hadn't noticed before. The finale of the fireworks filled the sky with a myriad of colours: terracotta, gold, lilac, aquamarine bursts that blossomed on the horizon like buds in summer, and filling our ears with the sound of a crackling bonfire magnified a hundred times and we fell silent again until I asked over the noise. "What is it that you like so much about them? Other than the memories, I mean."

This question, for N, wasn't dissimilar to his 'and what do you believe?' a couple of months before, and I got the sense that he wanted to answer properly as he bit his lip, considering it.

'S all about the possibilities, isn't it? My Dad never got it after he stopped making money out of 'em – what's the point in watching beautiful things die? Reminding yourself that everything's going to end? But I don't think that's it. I can't see them as dying things." He was twisting his fingers, trying to arrange his thoughts in the right order. "At first, they just keep coming and every time one starts fading, another takes its place, and maybe that isn't dying, that's remaking yourself. Creating something brighter than what was there before, ya' know? And then, even after the last explosion, after they've burned with every scrap of colour and energy they've got, you can still see 'em burning behind your eyelids and the sound keeps ringing in your ears. They're beautiful even after they've disappeared - and I reckon thinkin' about life like that helps with a hell of a lot."

Yes. As Newt spoke, the last few explosions were trailing through the sky and I could see exactly what he meant – when I moved my head to look across at the shadowed mountains in the distance, the kaleidoscope of fireworks was still painted across my vision, obscuring everything else and illuminating parts of the view in its technicolour haze. I leaned into his shoulder and nodded.

"Yes, that's it. Absolutely. There's no death – I think there's maybe a kind of immortality to it."

Frowning, I was trying desperately to show him how much I was thinking about his observation, how much more that was than what I'd expected him to say but how well he'd explained, when a voice came echoing from inside the building, at least a few corridors - maybe even a few floors - away.

"Newt! NEWT! Dude, come on, where are you?!" Minho had clearly lost the Table Soccer Tournament.

I heard Newt huff air through his nose at the sound, almost a laugh.

"I think Min's about to burst a lovin' blood vessel…They might have missed us by now, Lil… Maybe we should go back in?" He didn't answer the shout, though.

I said nothing, my eyes fixed on the skyline where the last sparks were still fading out of sight, firstly because I didn't want to move and break this moment, to go back inside and dissipate whatever this was between us, and second - there was a strange quality to Newt's voice now that I'd never heard before. I didn't know which one of us moved closer during the fireworks, but there was no longer a three-foot gap between us on the ridge. He was sitting just a few centimetres away, our shoulders touching from the moment I'd leaned into him. All three trains of thought made my stomach flip over and a juddering feeling spread through my limbs, holding me in place. After what felt like minutes, but can only have been a few seconds, Newt said:

"Hey, Lilypad – look at me, will ya'?"

"Why?" I made my question redundant by twisting around, knowing my face had flushed as red as the firecrackers and hoping the moonlight wouldn't give me away. Newt was so close that I could feel his breath against my hair before I looked up to do as he asked. His expression was earnest, intense, unreadable and his voice was barely above a whisper.

"Lily, I – I just-"

I never did find out what the end of that sentence was supposed to be; what alternate endings were running through Newt's mind as we sat there because he never finished it.

He kissed me instead.

In the first second, our teeth clashed as our lips met and I felt his sharp intake of breath, tiny bolts of electricity flashing through my body and tilted my head slightly, solving the problem before he could pull back, and that was all it took. We were kissing. Newt was kissing me on the roof of a W.I.C.K.E.D compound in December. And somehow, through the haze of colour and electricity that had clouded my mind, I realised vaguely that our lips were the only point of contact between us. Through the kiss, N had kept those few centimetres there, leaving a space between our bodies for me to pull away, if I changed my mind, if he'd read everything wrong. But I didn't. And he hadn't. So, with bravery I didn't know I possessed, I shifted towards him and wrapped my arms around his back, pulling him in closer until one of his hands rested on the small of my back, holding me to him until I could feel his wooden pendant against my chest, his other hand sliding into my hair, tracing the lines of my face.

Sitting in my bedroom back home, I had read a lot of first kisses. I had lived through hundreds of moments where lips met and the world changed. But sitting in Newt's arms on the facility roof, I couldn't feel his touch 'setting me on fire' or my 'chest exploding', and his lips didn't feel like 'velvet'. They were warm in the winter breeze, sending shivers down my spine and his arms around me felt certain, safe.

When Min and Karly kissed, it always seemed like an affectionate duel, a charged battle for dominance, but Newt kissed like he was giving something. Like, with every movement of his lips, brush of his fingertips, he was offering up some part of himself, and I felt myself opening up, doing the same, catching us both in this moment of shared emotion, tangling together like strands of a tapestry. In that moment, he held me like I was spun from glass or the fibres of a passing cloud, like I'd break or blow away in the breeze if he held me any tighter, like the sparks of the fading fireworks, and I couldn't understand how I'd ever thought that anywhere he'd sat before had been close to me. This was close, too close and not close enough, all at once, sending my mind and every nerve in my body whirling into overdrive. I reached up, running my hands through Newt's hair, my fingers catching awkwardly in a knot close to his scalp and I whispered again, my lips against the shell of his ear: "You really need to get this cut, N" and felt a shiver course through him as he laughed softly before tilting my face back up to his.

Now, I'm not a woman who's kissed many men but I'm still fairly certain that no two kisses can ever feel the same. But with that kiss, by throwing Newt and I together to go through hell, W.I.C.K.E.D had unconsciously created an indelible sense of belonging. Of something inarguably right. A sense that would save more lives than the two of ours – though it would do that more than once.

"Newt! Come on – where the freaking hell are you?!" Minho's voice filtered into my consciousness, much closer now, probably in the corridor below. "Newt!"

Newt pulled away, but still the moment didn't shatter. We sat on the ridge, our faces flushed, breathing uneven and N was studying my face like he was terrified he'd suddenly forget what this fragment of time felt like.

And then he was gone – squeezing my hands in his with an uncertain smile and disappearing down the nearby ladder to Minho with a cry of: "Patience is a bloody virtue, my friend!", leaving me alone on the roof.

I stood there for a minute, waiting for their footsteps to die away, for my breathing to steady and my pulse to stop echoing in my ears. I tipped my head back, as N had done, looking at the thousands of silver pinpricks stretched out above me – the only other witnesses. Then, throwing a final glance at The Giant Saucepan, I lifted the cover and dropped back down into the deserted corridor.

Looking back at it now, falling in love with Newt was like jumping off the Glade walls. Every part of my brain told me: 'This is a really bad idea' but my heart decided it didn't care – flying was possible. This boy with his technicolour spirit who saw so much wonder in a single star. This boy who kissed me like I was a precious thing he had no right to touch. This boy who knew every expression on my face, made me laugh until I cried, let me cry until I laughed. This boy who broke my heart more times than I thought possible, yet somehow managed to fuel my spirit.

He was my inevitable. I was always going to fall for him.

  
  



	20. Time Bombs, Trials and Top-Secret Missions

**Chapter 20 – Time Bombs, Trials and Top-Secret Missions**

**TWO YEARS LATER**

**W.I.C.K.E.D TRAINING CENTRE**

"Lily, what if I built it into a pyramid?"

The branch that Gally was suspended from was creaking ominously as he wrapped his legs around it, bending backwards, python-like, to construct a protective barrier around the crimson flag at the top of our pole.

The Trial was a ridiculously complicated version of 'Capture The Flag', with the whole centre divided into pairs – Newt with Karly, Minho with Beth, Alby with Sonya, Gally with me and so on – and then these pairs were pitted against each other. So, even though there were more than fifty flags in the simulated forest we were fighting in, you could only win by capturing the flag of your opposing pair – ranking points were deducted for touching a player from another pair, even to help. Also, as if that wasn't confusing enough with just under two hundred teenagers and who-knows-how-many flags, only one member of each team could touch the flagpole – the other had to defend it against the opposite team's attacker. You can imagine which job Gally got, with the multiple black eyes he'd earned in combat classes.

"Wouldn't that cover the flag, Gal? We'd get a penalty." I passed the thick branch I'd ripped from a nearby oak to function as a weapon between my hands and frowned up at the boy in the tree. He made a noise of generic frustration and turned himself the right way up, jumping down to fix whatever I wasn't seeing.

"No, no, you don't get it!" Gally knelt down by a bush and heaved at a stone the size of a small dog and pushed it to the base of our pole, then scrabbled back to find another as he explained over his shoulder. "The flag's at head height right now; if I add a pyramid to the bottom – 'cause a pyramid's stronger than a cuboid, they could push over a cuboid – then they'd have to demolish the whole thing or climb something to get the flag, and then you could take them out!"

I followed him into the thicket and helped him extract another boulder, using my branch as leverage and nodded, clapping him on the shoulder. "Not sure about 'taking them out', but - sounds good, Captain. Full steam ahead."

Gally just grinned at the old nickname and mock-saluted, focused on his pyramid plan. He hadn't changed much over last two years: his thick black hair was longer, he was a few centimetres taller and he'd attempted to grow a scruffy beard more than once (puberty hitting the younger sets of the camp recently had been an interesting one – that hadn't been a conversation Newt and Al had wanted to have with Jeff), but otherwise, Gally had remained his usual quick-witted, well-meaning self. He had proved a surprisingly good architect, though – he had a real eye for how things fitted together and how much strength they'd have when they did, far outstripping the rest of us. Even Crazy Mr Mathewson had ranked him in the top five in the last Building exam. So I was fairly happy to perch in front of his structure, trying to track our opponents.

Even at W.I.C.K.E.D, the forest wasn't big enough for all of us to spread out, so Newt and Karl were just a few feet to the left, Karly trying to incorporate their flag into the nearest tree as Newt constructed elaborate trip vines around it, a sharpened stick at his hip. Minho and Beth were behind us – Minho standing guard, arms folded, his eyes flicking around the clearing as Beth fiddled with the flag position on the pole. Sonya and Alby were taking the complete opposite approach to us, trying to force their flagpole as close to the ground as possible so it didn't act as a beacon for Clint and Harriet, their attackers. We'd all been given Locators at the start of the task, but one of the first things Colby had taught us in Coding class was how to disable them, so - with the exception of one or two pairs who had forgotten - the screens that should have betrayed our positions were blank.

I'd hoped that we'd be able to catch a glimpse of Sam and Fiona's location (our opponents) before they vanished, but although Sam's strategy was limited to an 11th century-style charge, Fi was fast and she'd scrambled the device before they even left the starting pad – and I thought we'd been quick. Their speed and the size of the forest meant that our only option was to wait for them to attack us and hope to disable their defender.

"Ow!"

Karly's yelp of pain cut through the air as I waited. A strange orange-leaved plant was protruding from the tree trunk she'd been wrestling with, vicious-looking brown spines all over the stem - one of which she was slowly extracting from the skin of her palm, her eyes narrowed in discomfort. Newt was by her side immediately, hacking the thing off the tree with a stone and poking at it. The thing curled and rolled at his contact.

"You okay?" When she nodded, he spun around to the rest of us in the glade and called. "Right, nobody touch those! They look like those Constrictor plant buggers we had in the last exam. If ya' see one, just bash it!"

Karly bumped into him with her shoulder, forcing him back towards their flagpole with an irritated growl. "Don't help them, Newton – that's not the point! Help me, then keep your mouth shut!"

Unruffled, Newt laughed, "Sorry – reflex" and turned back, his eyes meeting mine over Gally's structure. I shook my head at him, feigning disapproval and he just flashed a crooked smile and winked. Honestly.

Min's voice carried then: "You can't talk, Honey Muffin – you shrieking like a frigging strangled cat was a pretty good hint.'

Luckily, Beth mouthed 'penalty' at Karly before she could throw N's spear at Min's head, so she just replied in a sickly sweet voice. "Call me Honey Muffin again, Sugar Bear, and I'll break your neck before you can get Cut."

Minho and Karl had started their relationship as they meant to go on: embarrassing nicknames, affectionate, if somewhat aggressive, threats, breaking up over miniscule things (ranking scores, birthday cards, The Vest), then maybe hanging out with somebody else for half an evening – both had a string of willing volunteers – before realising that nobody else had quite the same sense of humour, or the same smile or the same insult-game and they'd be back together by the next morning, both fiercely trying to hide the fact that they actually truly cared about the other.

Minho opened his mouth to shoot back some razor-sharp response, but the show was cut short by a crash from the right as Sam came barrelling out of the cover of the forest with a yell – he was clearly going for the demolishing technique, including Gally and I in the destruction as long as he ended up with the flag. I managed to shout: "Gal, watch out for Fiona!" before Sam was level with me, his arm raised for a blow to my head.

Looking back on it, the changes we'd already gone through by that point – two years after the Automaton trial that had broken Sonya's ankle and landed Gally on a stretcher – were enormous. My brain had filled up with panic, fear and more panic as I'd faced that automaton with its glowing eyes. Now, all I was thinking was how I could deflect Sam's blow in any way that could end with him on the ground. When he flung a fist towards me, I ducked, going to grab his forearm like Colby had taught me, but the angle was awkward and Sam spun round, wrapping his huge arms around my waist and pinning my arms behind my back. Damn. Sam was strong and, like Newt, was at least a foot taller than me – I couldn't win with brute force and I had seconds before he moved his arms to my neck, to the buzzer we'd been given to disable each other, freezing our opponent's scoreboard.

Wait – like Newt. I had it.

I planted my feet and bent back from my knees and my waist, forcing him to bend too, almost past his centre of gravity, which would have sent us both backwards. Sam just had time to make a noise of confusion before I threw my bodyweight forwards, using his imbalance and my momentum to force us both to the floor – and I swear I heard Newt laugh. Ouch. I'd co-ordinated the fall so I'd landed on my side, rather than my face, but it still sent a wave of pain through my body. That's going to bruise. The impact and the instinct to cover his face meant that Sam had let go of me, so before he could move, I scrambled across, put one knee between his shoulder blades, just below his neck and one foot on the back of his knees, leaning my weight forwards so he couldn't roll or stand. Sam tried yelling for Fiona, but she was up running between the trees with Gally on her tail. Abandoned, he cast a despairing look at the other pairs and whined:

"Guys – Newt! Your girlfriend's freaking pinned me!"

That wasn't a word we used very often, Newt and I. It was what we were, obviously, but those labels always felt ridiculous when we were trapped in a research facility, lab rats for scientists trying to stop the world from dying. 'Girlfriends' and 'boyfriends' belonged in cul-de-sacs, cities and towns, worlds in which first dates, anniversaries, proposals, lives were possible. Not here. So it always felt silly – but that was what we were. The morning after he'd kissed me on the roof of Block 6, I'd pulled him into a side-room before breakfast to ask him what it meant – if he'd somehow drunk some of Axel's punch before following me, if it was a spur of the moment thing that didn't mean anything at all. But with faltering words that had failed us the night before, we both managed to convey the fact that, nope, that had meant quite a lot, actually, thank you very much. And with fewer words, we worked out that, with a little forward-planning, kissing without clashing teeth actually isn't that hard.

The funniest thing was that nobody but us had seemed surprised. When we came into the Canteen holding hands for the first time, a round of applause started up from the tables nearest to us and spread throughout the whole room, Minho shouting stuff like 'about freaking time!" until I was blushing furiously and almost scampering back out of the door, but Newt held tight to my hand, anchoring me there and smiling until I started to laugh. When we sat down, Frankie had looked across with a confused expression and muttered: 'Wait, you guys, weren't together?"

As little as it counts, for someone who hadn't been outside since they were nine, by the end of that time, I knew Newt better than I'd ever known anyone – I'd never understood when people described others as extensions of themselves, but it made more sense over those years. I could tell what he was feeling by the pace of his breathing, the look in his eyes. I'd watched every test, every fall in skating and aerial skills, strapped every twisted ankle and he'd been right there as I climbed the tower outside the W.I.C.K.E.D building, as I fought people twice my size, as I cried on my parents' birthdays. Our hypersensitivity to each other, where we were, never faded, just settled into a comfortable awareness, an understanding. By that day, I could imitate his accent almost exactly – he loved putting on mine – and his bunk in Dorm 4 was almost as familiar as my own from all the evenings I'd spent curled there, sometimes playing music, sometimes reading stories to the gaggle of multi-aged boys who materialised in the evenings, sometimes practicing what we'd started on the roof, but often just talking (not after Curfew, obviously. There may or may not have been some hairy moments trying to get back to the right rooms before 10:00). But in answer to Sam's whinge, Newt didn't even look up from the trip wires he was weaving around his flag, only smirking:

"Yeah, she does that. Go for his wrists, Lil."

I already had – within the next five seconds, I'd yanked his wrists behind his back, pinned them with my other leg and used my free hand to press Sam's buzzer. It emitted the high-pitched shriek that meant he had to remain where he was until the buzzer sounded again (on pain of disqualification) and I rolled off the older boy.

"Sorry, Sam!"

He just growled. I left him on the ground, sprinting into the forest to help Gally. In the end, I needn't have bothered. Their camp was only a few hundred metres away from ours and, although Fi was fast, she was uncoordinated – Gally was stronger and just as tall; without Sam getting in the way, it only took him a few minutes to overpower her and snatch their flag from the beacon they'd worked into a tree.

As we ran back to the starting pad, Gally slapped my hands in a triumphant high-five, letting out a whoop of triumph as he handed Sam and Fi's flag in to Colby, who smiled and patted him on the shoulder. "Nice one, guys – get inside and wait in the back."

There were at least fifty people in the Changing Rooms when we got there and it didn't take very long for the others to join us - Alby and Sonya came first, having just beaten Clint and Harriet (Clint was already sporting a bruise for which Alby was profusely apologising), then Newt and Karly who had just lost out to Borro and Sophie, catching the flag within seconds of each other and finally Minho and Beth, with Jackson and Amy – Beth's suspension of the flagpole from an oak tree had worked; even though Amy had found their flag first, she couldn't reach it, giving Beth time to snatch theirs off Jackson.

We were tired, as usual, as we climbed back up the hundreds of steps to ground level, but comfortably tired, everyone a mess of limbs and hugs, the air a storm of complaints, compliments and conversation, continual clamouring to be heard over the hundred others in the space, unaware that this was the last time we would ever do it. I was trying to force my eyes open in the warm, semi-darkness of the stairwell when Newt wrapped an arm around my shoulders, bringing me back to reality.

"Well, that trick with Sam was real impressive, huh, Lilybird?"

I reached up, lazily twining my fingers through his. "It wasn't so bad. 'S not like you know what that feels like or anything…"

My grin was teasing - I'd taken Newt down with the same move when Ava Paige had paired us for combat a few months before. He was stronger, bigger and faster than me; I didn't have a hope in face-to-face fighting, so I'd had to use his height to my advantage, forcing him over his centre of gravity until he lost his balance and pinning him until he tapped out. He sniffed, pretending to be offended.

"Oh, please – don't take the bloody credit, I was the inspiration not the lovin' victim."

"Yeah, yeah, okay. If that makes you feel better about it."

Laughing, Newt leaned over and softly kissed the top of my head – something he did a lot because he had to bend to kiss me properly – and I sighed quietly, leaning into him for a second, until I spotted Jackson over N's shoulder and pulled away a little, catching the flicker of sadness as it faded from his features. We'd tried not to be overly 'cute' around Jax – Olly had been Cut after our Ice Trial just after Christmas. W.I.C.K.E.D had gone months without Cutting any of us at first, and even when we hit the two year mark, only one hundred people had left, but there had been more and more Cuts over recent months, one every few weeks accompanied by more and more Trials, sometimes three a day – it felt strangely like W.I.C.K.E.D were panicking. Losing Olly had ripped a gaping hole in our Set; the staff had forced Jackson out of his room for meals and activities, but he'd stumbled through them like a zombie, not speaking and picking at his food for months. We'd rallied round him, but what could we say when W.I.C.K.E.D wouldn't even tell us where Olly had gone?

Knowing I'd seen him, Jax moved across and joined in the conversation. "Hey, wasn't it weird that you guys weren't paired together again? It feels like they mixed something up with this Trial – Minho and Beth rather than Beth and Gal, and Alby with Sonya rather than Harriet. Don't you think?"

He was right. Around February, W.I.C.K.E.D stopped testing us individually and started testing us against each other: one boy, one girl. We'd been paired up for Sense Tests, one-on-one combat sessions, memory trials, puzzle races, rearranged over and over. Clint, Alby, Sam, Dmitri, Jeff, Jackson, Miles, Nick, Borro, but in March, Newt and I had been sorted together and, for some reason, we'd stayed like that. And after a while, rather than being the exception, it seemed to become the rule – Min was continually drawn against Karly, Beth with Gally, Alby with Harriet, Frypan with Sonya, Clint with Mariella. Until today's trial, I hadn't been drawn against anyone other than Newt for weeks.

Newt nodded slowly. "I'd thought the same buggin' thing, actually. Wonder what's bonking around their brains this time."

"Well, there's absolutely no point trying to guess." Minho appeared on the other side of Jax with Karly, who was still picking Constrictor spines out of her braids. "We're too normal - it's gotta be a shitstorm of weird up in there."

"Yeah, we'd all be full-gone Cranks before we could work out that crap." Alby, who was walking a few feet ahead of Newt and I, level with Nick and Borro, gave a derisive snort.

By now, the first few people had reached the top of the staircase, and light from Surface-level was starting to filter in, making everyone screw up their eyes. I sighed and beckoned to the others, pulling Gally to one side so he didn't trip over a protruding elevator lever. "Come on then – let's go and watch more videos of screaming lunatics and hope we don't all blow up when that clock hits zero."

This was something else that W.I.C.K.E.D had taken to doing. Every night after dinner, we all had to file into the White Room while Chancellor Michael broadcast news from all over the world. Selectively, obviously – we never got to see the Scientific Advancement fairs or the International Peace Parades in London and Tokyo. All we saw was the world gradually going to hell; fortified cities like Austin and Canberra falling, overrun by the disease and the decay that dogged it, well-known politicians and celebrities succumbing, videos of countless orphans, in developed and third world countries. Even Thomas and Teresa were made to stand at the back of the auditorium, their faces drawn and knuckles white. Someone high up had clearly told Chancellor Michael that this would make us work and somehow, we hadn't run out of tears yet.

The other thing that had haunted everyone during the Flag Trial was the clock on the wall of the Canteen. Its appearance had never been explained, never even been mentioned by the W.I.C.K.E.D staff. It just clicked down from its first '731 Days' more than two years ago, one number for every day that passed. Every once in a while, it would skip a few days, jumping down a week or a fortnight, usually in time with some new disaster that hit international news. What it was counting down to, we had no idea. That didn't stop us from guessing: some people believed it was a final exam, others that it was an extermination date, the point where everyone gets Cut. Some optimists even hoped that it was a release date, that this was when everything ends – but the situation felt too dire for that. How could W.I.C.K.E.D let go of two hundred Immunes when there still wasn't a cure? At first, we thought they'd say something when the clock reached two years to go. 722 Days. Nothing.

We thought we'd know at 700.

At 500.

They'd tell us with a year to go.

At 100.

Surely we'd know by a month?

A week.

Nothing.

They never explained it; most employees would pretend not to hear when we asked - even Colby, our closest ally in the 'enemy camp', had frowned and told us with a tired expression: 'Trust me, when ya'll need to know, you'll know"– until today.

When the clock finally reached 1.

5:00 PM – The White Room

As usual, we filed down the corridor towards the White Room after dinner for Chancellor Michael's broadcast, the same buzz of chatter filling the air: Axel tossing Dave's left shoe across the room at Sam until George wrestled it off him, Mariella trying to braid Amy's hair as she walked, Gally doing his best to herd the Babies (who were now more pre-teen than baby, but the name stuck) together at the front of the line. I was standing towards the back, sandwiched between Alby and Karly, talking about I-don't-know-what, when something not so usual fell over the candidates entering the auditorium, a strange sense of discomfort and a rising mutter spreading along the line. I craned my neck but all I could see was the back of Borro's head and the arm he had around Nick's shoulders.

"What's going on?" I turned to Karly instead, the unease settling itself in my stomach. "The countdown?"

She was biting her lip, something she almost never did, for fear of wrecking the skin. "I don't know…'seems likely, though, right? I mean, they've never bothered giving us any notice before." Karly sighed and twisted around to Newt, a few paces behind us. "Ugh – I'm too short. Can't you see, Newton? You're the giraffe."

Newt was frowning, his dark eyes narrowed. Placing one hand on Alby's shoulder to steady himself, he pushed up on his toes to get his head above the roiling sea of candidates. "No, I – wait – I can't see properly, they're all moving, but I think there's more people in there than usual."

"Huh? What does that mean?" Alby's head snapping around almost made Newt lose his balance.

"Ah! I don't know, I said, I can't bloody see – the Chancellor isn't the only one on the stage. There's a ton of other people – white shirts and stuff – but I can't make 'em out. And there's something weird on the screen."

With the W.I.C.K.E.D workers on the door hustling people in even faster than usual, it wasn't long before we saw that Newt was right. Chancellor Michael was standing with Ava Paige by the podium at the front of the auditorium, but to his left were rows upon rows of people in W.I.C.K.E.D's standard issue uniform minus the coat – black trousers and a white embroidered shirt. Standing there seemed to be everyone we'd ever had anything to do with: Colby, Mr Maddox, Crazy Mr Mathewson, Miss Lockhart, Mr Anderson, Mr Aleksandrov, Mrs Trevelyan – our cartography instructor, the Canteen staff, all of the people who had ever trained us for assessment, or put us through it – even Nurse Alcott was there with the Matron. Thomas and Teresa were sitting on the edge of the stage with two other teenagers, a blond boy and an auburn-haired girl – we hadn't seen much of Thomas and Teresa over the years, particularly not for the last few months, but whenever we had, it had been friendly. All of them were wearing sombre, tired expressions that only increased my unease tenfold. But that wasn't even the strangest thing.

On the screen behind the stage, wider than any cinema screen, the usual Cranks, scientists and orphans weren't playing. Instead, we were. Alby beating the automaton in our first Trial with his score of 175. George and Annabelle disabling the explosives in the Suburban Sabotage Exam with five seconds to go. Karly rearranging hundreds of numbers in a Cognitive Speed Test. Nick and Borro running Senior Warm-Ups on the soccer field while little Chuck ran in circles around them. Clint and Beth nestled in beanbags in the West Library like burrowing owls. Newt scoring a ten in Aerial Skills after landing a triple somersault from the highest hoop. Me reading stories to Dorm 5 last Christmas with Winston on my lap and tinsel in my hair. Minho and Sonya hysterically laughing as Frankie re-enacted something stupid in the Canteen. Fragments of moments, of memories, from our time there flickering across the screen, W.I.C.K.E.D somehow condensing more than three years of our lives into ten minutes that played on a loop. What was this?

The muttering grew into a murmur as the minutes passed and the clips continued, Chancellor Michael exchanging notes with Ava Paige and the man at her side. Finally, he stepped up to the podium and called for attention – just as unnecessarily as when he had done so three years ago – and even the smallest candidate fell absolutely silent.

The screen behind him went black for a second, before replacing the clips with still photographs of some of the boys, corresponding names and numbers appearing below them. Clint – Group A: A3, George – Group A: A4, Isaac 'Newt' – Group A: A5, Alby – Group A: A6, Minho – Group A: A7, Nick – Group A: A8, Borro – Group A: A9, Jackson – Group A: A10. The list kept going, a new face every few seconds. I felt a flicker of fear as I looked across at my friends – what was W.I.C.K.E.D doing with them now?

Chancellor Michael gave a quiet cough, like a favourite uncle starting a fairytale, and then began in his gravelly voice. "Good evening, subjects. I trust you are all well-fed and watered after your Trial today? The results were, as always, impressive. Now, you may remember that the first time I gathered you here I told you that are here because you are immeasurably special. That is true. And today I tell you – you hundred and twenty subjects - that you are still here because you are the elite, the best of the best."

I couldn't help thinking back to those that W.I.C.K.E.D had not considered 'elite': Emmie and Alexa and Erin and Mike and Yan and Olly. Intelligent, good people. What did we have that they didn't? And what had they suffered for it?

"We have spent the last three years analysing your behaviour and your brain patterns from every angle possible, honing and exploring your minds, pushing you to the limit of our Sub-Levels. We have poured over your results and rankings for hours on end, and over recent weeks, we have arranged and rearranged the lists you see behind me, moving positions, switching subjects and orders – there are many employees on this stage behind me that have received very little sleep for the last month, working on this for you, to ensure the best possible situations and parallels for you. Therefore, I am very pleased to tell you that every person in this room has been selected for The Trials."

There were a few gasps around the auditorium, but nobody spoke. We knew this was coming; Chancellor Michael had made it clear a long time ago that it was make The Trials or be Cut. In our ignorance, we had no choice but make that our goal, to consider this a victory. All the same – if every horrible thing we'd already done had only been a practice…I reached across and took Karly's hand. She squeezed it tight, running her thumb up and down my wrist. The screen behind Chancellor Michael went white, freezing on Benjamin – Group A: A22. Then Mariella's face appeared above Group B: B3, followed by Annabelle – Group B: B4, Lilianne – Group B: B5, Harriet – Group B: B6, Karly – Group B: B7, Sonya – Group B: B8, Amy – Group B: B9, Fiona – Group B: B10. The pattern followed the boys', candidate after canidate until Sophie – Group B: B22. I felt Karly's fingernails carve grooves into the back of my hand as our faces appeared on-screen. I couldn't feel anything – it didn't make any sense yet. Why are they only showing some of us? There were people of both genders who were older, like Dmitri and Jenna, who hadn't been mentioned. Why? Chancellor Michael didn't leave much time for speculation.

"As I'm sure you're all aware – from your own understanding of the world's condition and from the clock installed in the Canteen – the time for the Trials is now upon us. The amount that we can inform you about the Trials themselves without it affecting your performance in them is exceptionally limited, so I suggest you listen hard."

Another suggestion so obvious that I almost laughed. As if we could do anything else.

"We will be operating a staggered entry system into the Trials. The forty candidates on the screen behind me will be the first to enter them - the rest of you will follow in subsequent weeks until all of you have participated. Do not be concerned, regardless of whether your name appears here or not, these forty people have been selected via complex calculations that will not affect your performance. Furthermore, we have made an executive decision that, to prevent prolonged panic and decreased cognitive ability, the Trials will begin tomorrow at 7am sharp."

This proclamation seemed to pierce the silence that had fallen, tearing holes in it as fierce whispers began to spread around the room. Chancellor Michael continued, after a nod of confirmation from Ava Paige, as if they were frightened to stop in case we wouldn't let them continue.

"The final details that we can reveal to you are that, firstly, The Trials will be split by gender - our female candidates will be analysed separately from our males. Finally, in order for the results of The Trials to be of any use in the development of a Flare vaccine, it is crucial that you do not retain any memories that could affect your decisions or give you an unfair advantage. Therefore, at 7am tomorrow – in an entirely safe procedure, I assure you – your memories will be wiped."

Even with the microphones and the thousand-dollar sound system, Chancellor Michael couldn't hope keep control after that. The room erupted, the errant whispers evolving into a full-scale roar and, meanwhile, my brain stopped functioning – wiping our memories? They were wiping our memories?

"What?!" Karly grabbed my other hand then, turning me round to face her. Her dark blue eyes were enormous, an expression I'm fairly sure I was mirroring. "Sorry, what the freaking actual hell!? Is that even possible? Is that even legal?"

Minho leaned forward from the row behind and, for once, he wasn't laughing. "Of course it's not. But, we're 'property of W.I.C.K.E.D', remember?"

Clint was bouncing up and down in his seat, wringing his hands. "Gordon Bennett – tomorrow! All of us!"

Newt didn't say anything from his spot two seats down. He was twisting the pendant I'd given him two birthdays ago between his fingers, around and around, until the pieces of cord that held it were tangled in three different places. I wished I could reach him from here. 'Analysed separately'. They're splitting us up.

More than anything, I couldn't get over how vague it was. It was difficult to get your head around something like that when blind fear kept getting in the way. "But what does that even mean? What are they wiping? Will we not remember our training? Will we not remember each other? Or will we just not remember how to walk? What are we talking here?"

Alby was shaking his head, looking straight forwards. "Can't put anything past the bastards. And they sure as hell ain't gonna tell us."

He gestured to where Chancellor Michael was standing on the podium, gesticulating wildly, his lips moving soundlessly as our noise crashed over him, a wave of fear and rising panic. It was only when he forced the volume of the microphone up and screamed "SILENCE!" that it finally fell.

"Ladies and gentlemen! Thank you. I do hope your order will be significantly better than that or you will suffer for it in The Trials. Now, let me assure you, the memory Swipe will only affect your memories of people and places and situations – specific memories - you will retain all of your current physical abilities and a basic understanding of the world around you. And it is a temporary measure. As soon as you complete The Trials, your memories will be returned to you. This is not up for questioning. It is effective tomorrow. Remember, we are incredibly proud of you. You are exceptional individuals. And remember – no harm will come to you. With W.I.C.K.E.D, you are safe."

I heard Jax's bark of derisive laughter, saw Amy's fingers go to the shoulder she'd dislocated and the collarbone she'd broken in two places. I'm not sure that anyone believed 'safe' anymore. The Chancellor paused to allow the assembled staff to nod and murmur their agreement.

"For those entering at 7am – get an early night, you may well need it. Goodbye, for now. And good luck."

And with that, Chancellor John Michael turned and disappeared through the white wall panel at the back of the stage. I never saw him again.

The roar that had temporarily died down filled my ears again as the rest of the W.I.C.K.E.D staff disappeared through the same door, some of them reluctantly – Colby and Nurse Alcott looked back, frozen in the doorway, searching the crowd for the faces of their candidates. Our own door opened behind us as people started pushing and shouting, people crying and screaming questions and some just plain screaming. Through the writhing mass forcing their way out of the room, as if the coral corridors could save them from the 'executive decision', I suddenly caught sight of Thomas over Annabelle's shoulder. What did he know?

"Thomas! Thomas – wait! Please, wait! Thomas!" My voice was thick, somehow.

He heard me. I know he heard me. His hand froze on the folder he was picking up from the table by the podium. He stopped walking. But he didn't turn. Thomas just wrapped an arm around Teresa as she started to cry into her hands – Teresa, Teresa was crying? – and led her out of the door, closing it behind him with a crash that rang around the auditorium.

I felt N slip his arms around my waist, still silent as Minho and Karly appeared on his left, hands locked together. Alby rested an elbow on Newt's shoulder and Clint plonked himself down in the middle of the aisle, leaning against Alby's legs, his head balanced on his hand. The six of us, together again, alone in the auditorium, just like another, very different day one.

W.I.C.K.E.D couldn't take this away from us. Could they?

The corridor outside the White Room was crowded, full of candidates running up and down between rooms, gabbling their way through the information we'd been given in the hope of rearranging the words into an order that made any sense. W.I.C.K.E.D employees were milling around, attempting to force us into a state of calm, but they were hopelessly outnumbered. By the time I reached the end of the corridor, I'd lost sight of most of the others, separated by the chaos, but just as I was about to turn left back towards the Common Room, there was a tap on my shoulder and a hand in mine, pulling me to the right instead.

"Lily." It was Newt. It's funny, I can remember exactly what N looked like that night – he was wearing scuffed running sneakers, dark blue jeans and a long-sleeved black top with 'W.I.C.K.E.D' stitched onto the left breast in white thread. His short blond hair was sticking up at the front where he'd been running his fingers through it and he was biting his lip, his gaze not entirely focused on me.

"Hey, what's up?" I meant it genuinely - he looked so out of it – but the second the words left my lips, I realised how monumentally stupid they were and started to laugh as he cracked an answering smile.

"Er, only the whole buggin' universe turning upside down, but other than that…" Newt tilted his head towards the nearby staircase leading to the patio. "All this yapping's driving nails through my skull – come outside with me?"

I nodded, wanting to snatch any moments I could before W.I.C.K.E.D could snatch him away, but his attempted smile didn't quite reach his eyes.

"Yes, sure, but N-" Taking hold of his shirt, I gently tugged him down to my level and pressed a fleeting kiss to his lips – something that had been awkward once, nervous even, but now seemed as easy as breathing. "We're okay."

Newt kept hold of my hand as I pulled back but smiled, slightly more earnestly now. "Yeah. Yeah, I'm okay."

Unsurprisingly, we were the only people on the patio. It led out onto the soccer pitches, but apart from George and Dmitri practicing archery over by the Canteen windows, there was nobody in sight. The sun was low in the sky – it would set soon – and there was a slight breeze, catching my hair and blowing it away from my face. I swung my legs across the concrete wall facing the forest and Newt scrambled over next to me, ready to dissect the Trial.

"Why do you think they're splitting us up?" I mused. "What's the point in that?"

They'd already kept us together for so long, I didn't understand what difference it could make. Newt frowned, rubbing his nose as he thought.

"Not sure. Maybe distractions? I mean-"

He gestured between us with a sudden smirk. I arched an eyebrow and bumped my shoulder against his.

"Oh, I'm a distraction now?"

"Well, yeah. Aside from how much I like your face, it's kind of difficult to balance across an ice-shelf when I'm worrying about you fallin' off."

"You fell off before me!" He chuckled at my indignant tone. "Plus, you worry about Alby and Min and Clint and Gally too - you being a worrier's never been gender-specific."

Newt nodded at that. "Yeah, I thought that too. I mean, goes both ways - Axel's kissed at least a third of the girls left in this place, but I don't think he'd ever worry about 'em. So maybe it isn't that. But maybe they don't mind us being like this here – friends and couples and everything – because there's time for that. Maybe we're not supposed to be friends in there, maybe it's go go go all the time, every-man-for-himself kind of thing. Maybe that's part of the weird memory loss too – they want us to focus, not be cryin' for our mummies the whole buggin' time."

He had a point, but that didn't quite seem right either. They'd made it clear that this trial would be longer than anything we'd done before – we couldn't work constantly, they'd burn us out and waste all of their nice blueprints. "Could be. Maybe the Flare reacts differently? For different genders?"

N wrinkled his nose. "Well, they're not going to buggin' give it to us, are they? 'Guess it wouldn't do much if they did though, everyone being Immune."

"I don't know. I hope not." The thought of encountering the Flare in any form, Immune or not, made my skin crawl. "But if our brain patterns are different, they could need more than one vaccine. So, they couldn't look at us together?"

"They better not need more than bloody one. We'll be here 'til we're eighty!"

"But think about how good I'll be at ice-skating by then." Even after two years, my skating skills were exceptionally limited. Clint had given up entirely after Hospitalgate and sat on the side reading - I could skate pretty fast now without anyone holding onto me, but if I tried to change direction or jump, I'd be flat on the ice in a second, as I'd exhibited at the weekend, when Karly had tried to teach me to pirouette. N had skated straight over but it took him five minutes to help me up because he was laughing so hard.

"Lily, love, the only way you'd ever be good at ice-skating would be because you'd have a Zimmer frame to lean on. Also – Leonora? That speed skater from the 2030s?"

I shook my head. "You've guessed that one already. Still not my name."

"Ugh! How have I not got it yet?" He growled in frustration. "Are you named after some exotic sea-creature from the depths of the bloody Bahamas? I'll get it. Wait and see."

Newt must have guessed two hundred names since that camping trip where I'd first mentioned it, but much to his eternal irritation, he'd been wrong every time. He'd tried to draw it out of me with cake, music, tickle-fights, tried to catch me off guard – asking me when I was half asleep in his dorm or in combat lessons or pulling back mid-kiss. He wouldn't even let anybody else guess; after two years, it had become a matter of pride. Smiling, we lapsed into silence for few minutes, watching the computer-generated birds flit their identical pattern through the trees as the setting sun tinged the leaves with gold, until Newt glanced at his watch: 7:00. I imagine the chill that went through my body was coursing through his at the sight. Twelve hours. Curfew was 10:00. We had three hours before everything changed again. I don't know who took whose hand.

"How long do you think it'll last? The Trial?"

Newt was biting the nails of his free hand. "I don't know. First of all, Chancellor Michael kept saying Trials, so there's probably more than one. And it's gonna be longer than everything here, so at least a couple of weeks – that camping trip we went on last month was a fortnight. I don't know – few weeks?"

"Can it be though? If they've spent three years training us for this one thing - I mean, Winnie and Charlie and Chuck, they're not strong enough yet. They could give it a good shot now, but not in combat, and the Chancellor said everyone had to join in. Even if they started intense training now, they wouldn't be ready until May at least. Do you really think it'll be weeks?"

"Maybe." He replied, in a voice that sounded like it was the last thing he believed. "Maybe I don't want to think about it being anything else."

Without giving me any warning and without letting go of my hand, Newt jumped off the wall, pulling me with him down the path between the trees – and I was happy to go, not wanting to think about a timeframe that couldn't ever be good. We ambled down the familiar route, pointing out all of the glitches in the system as we went: double-headed squirrel, lip-syncing blackbird, vines that disappear if you touch them, purple leaf on the evergreen tree and the spots where things had happened: where Gally broke his arm falling out of the oak tree, the bit of the lake where Clint found a surprise jellyfish and ran screaming up the bank, the den that we'd built with Colby out of sticks and mud that had collapsed as soon as it rained. What W.I.C.K.E.D never really understood was that this place, which was utterly fake to them, had become the only thing that was real for the teenagers who called it home. Eventually Newt spoke quietly, like he'd been psyching himself up for the last ten minutes:

"But you know what really has me buggin', Lilybird?"

He grabbed a vine around the nearest tree and swung himself up onto the lowest branch, shredding a leaf between his fingertips.

"What?" My voice was as quiet as his as I leant against the moss of the tree trunk, looking up at him.

Newt shredded a few more leaves then said. "It's this memory thing. This forgetting thing. It bloody terrifies me."

That wasn't something he'd say very often. Newt was different to Minho and Clint and Gal in that way, maybe a remnant of his life with his Dad. Maybe just part of who he was. Sometimes, moods would come over him – he'd get stuck in a rut somewhere in his head and it would keep pulling him back, again and again, for days at a time, but you had to spot it. You could do it if you knew him, but if you weren't careful, he'd bottle it. Hide it in his ever-present worry for other people, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about that in the hours after Chancellor Michael's announcement. If Minho and Alby forgot how to read him, forgot how to see his fear under his 'order' and compassion, what could happen then? I didn't want to imagine.

"I thought they were training us to be tough, to be able to take anything they throw at us – I thought that was the whole lovin' point of us being the 'Final Subjects'. And that's fine. I can take whatever crap they've thought up this time. But so much of that bravery depends on stuff I remember, ya' know? When I want to give up, I think about my Dad – what he'd say - when my mind goes blank and I need inspiration, I think about my Ma, when I need to laugh, I think about Min and Alby and all of you barmy idiots and when I'm sad, I think about you. But, what'll I do when that's not there? What'll I do if that's just an empty space?"

I knew what he meant. I'd had exactly the same thought – the memories of my Dad and my Mom were the only things I had of them and my friends were what kept me going through all of W.I.C.K.E.D's random hell - the idea of having to try and make friends again while already in the depths of hell, just without Newt and Winnie and all of our other boys, made me feel sick. He was right, and I was frightened – there wasn't an answer I could give him that would make it any better, but I tried:

"I know. I know, but that's not what it depends on. You're brave – I don't care how stupid it sounds, N, you're one of the bravest people I know. You ran away and you made something of yourself when everything good had been taken away – at that moment, the good parts of your memory space must have been bone dry, but you did it anyway, so-"

"Well, yeah, but I didn't have a choice."

"Yes, you did. I bet maybe two other people here would have done what you did that day. That's you; other people can help you out, N, but that's you. So I know you can do it again, whatever you think. And also – the whole 'memory' thing – I don't believe it. I don't believe they can do that."

Newt had looked reassured by the first part of my speech, running his thumb over his lizard pendant, but then he frowned, looking concerned and answering slowly. "Lil – you know they can. We've seen it, they can make us see things that aren't there, they've got the world's best scientists and more money than all the kings of England bloody put together. They can do it."

The feeling was solidifying, becoming a certainty the longer I lingered on it. I pushed myself away from the trunk and spun to face him, waving my hands around soundlessly, the words evading me.

"I just – ugh! See, I don't think it matters what they can do to my mind. Technically, scientifically, yeah, they can take my memories. This time tomorrow, I won't remember what your face looks like, I won't remember your name, I won't remember this conversation, but I will remember what this feels like, what being with you feels like."

Newt was still frowning, unconvinced, but he slid down from the tree and landed at my side, his eyes focused and I knew he really wanted to understand.

"They can't take that stuff; the feelings – no, the love, actually – I have for Karly and Min and Alby and Clint and Gal and Winnie and Nick and Charlie, and most of all, the way that I feel about you-" I gripped both of his hands in mine, pulling them towards me as I gesticulated, my chest burning with the intensity of the conviction. "Because I don't keep that in my head. I'm not a total cheeseball, I know my heart's one giant muscle – I don't keep it there – but all of that is so much deeper than my brain, than my memories. And I don't believe that some scientists, whatever drugs and contraptions they put in my head can touch that. I just don't, N."

Finished and suddenly embarrassed, I added his usual line: "Do ya' see?"

He laughed softly and pulled our hands back towards him, making me step closer. When I met his eyes, they were dark with a feeling I couldn't identify and he brushed my cheek with a fingertip. "Yeah, I see...and I love you, Lilybird. You know that?"

That wasn't the first time. Not by a long way. We'd said it, whispered it, written it and – one particularly memorable time – shouted it across a soccer field. But that time, in the middle of the simulated forest two hours before Curfew, it hung in the air like a scrap of magic, making my eyes sting and I blinked fiercely before he could notice. "I love you too, Backstreet Boy. That's what I just said – in a weird, complicated way. That's what I was trying to tell you."

"I know." He grinned, and this time, his eyes lit up with it. "I hear ya'."

The sun had almost disappeared now, the final few rays filtering through the trees to us, casting strange shadows on the branches around us, the kaleidoscope pattern reminding me of Newt's surprise party, a lifetime ago. Just then, there was a rustle in the leaves next to us and a tiny bird bounced through, stumbling onto a nearby branch and picking at the berries. Its wings were deep brown, the colour of N's eyes when he was concentrating, but its head was grey with a scarlet streak in the middle and a bright crimson chest. As we watched it, it turned its head and fiddled with the single jet-black feather in its tail. Newt froze, his grip on my hand suddenly painful.

"Wait…" A new expression dawned on him. "Wait – Linnet!" My shock must have shown on my face.

"That's it, isn't it? Linnet – that's your name!"

Rather than being startled away, the linnet-bird skipped closer, landing in the branches just above our heads and whistling, its voice carrying through the trees. I hadn't heard that name for so long. At Newt's shout, it was like a part of my brain that had been locked away for so long re-emerged, covered in dust and too small for my identity, but it was intact and it was familiar. I could hear my Dad's voice as Newt kept talking: 'Come on, Birdie – jump', 'Nettie, baby, don't you ever let anyone tell you what you want – you find something you want and you fight for it."

"Birdie – they didn't call you that 'cause you're so tiny, they called you that because it's your actual name! Ha-ha! Bloody hell, I'm an idiot – how did I not get that? Linnet! Bloody hell!" Newt's voice was saturated with glee and he picked me up around the waist, lifting me up above his head and spinning me around. The wind was in my ears and my face and I was laughing, he was laughing and the linnet's notes were echoing off the trees, laughing with us as we transcended W.I.C.K.E.D's oppression and the time limit they'd put on our relationship for a few stolen minutes. "And I've called you Lilybird for years! I told you, I buggin' told you I'd get it!"

He was like a child, spinning faster and faster, holding me aloft until his foot suddenly caught on a simulated tree root and we both went crashing to the ground amid shrieks and, in our position on a patch of moss on the ground under the oak tree, Newt pulled me backwards until my back was against his chest and then locked his arms around me, leaning his head against mine, both of us still laughing weakly. Then, as the last rays of sunlight disappeared from the sky, and the air got colder, the real world, the 8:10 pm time and the promise of tomorrow's Trial gradually filtered back into our consciousness and we stopped laughing, both of us terrified of losing this moment, this person. I leant back further into his chest and felt his arms tighten around me.

"Linnet what? Or am I guessin' that too?"

"Hmm? Oh, you'd never guess that - Serrallier. It's French, I think."

"Linnet Serrallier. 'S right pretty."

"Yeah, I always liked it." I looked down to the leather band on my wrist. The 'L' that my father had painted back home all those years ago was now followed by 'I-L-Y', painstaking added by Winston for his Handiwork piece last year. He'd done it for my birthday: 'So you can have everyone with you – your first family and your second one!' I'd been hesitant at first, but I'd liked his explanation so much that I'd let him do it. "I'm not sure it's me anymore, though, you know?"

Twisting the wristband between my fingertips, I suddenly had an idea. I felt Newt nod against my forehead, thinking of Daniel, but I was already wriggling backwards out of the hug. He looked up in surprise.

"You okay?"

"Yes – I just-" I fiddled with the clasp on the band; I took it off so rarely that it was stiff and more than a little rusty. After some wrangling and a few different angles, it fell apart with a click in my hand. "Got it! Now, give me your wrist."

"What?"

"Give me your wrist, Newt!"

With a confused expression, Newt obliged. Balancing his hand on my knee, I took the faded piece of leather and wrapped it around his wrist, forcing the clasp until it clicked shut again. "There."

Newt's eyes were wary, and a tiny frown had appeared between his eyebrows as he gradually processed what I was doing. Then he shook his head and immediately tried to unclasp it.

"Lil…I-I can't. This is your Dad's…" I placed my hand on top of his, moving it away from the band and looking straight into his eyes. Amber for brown.

"I know. And I want it back."

Newt held my gaze for a long second, the enormity of the Trial and the end results possible spinning in his head, then dropped it back to the bracelet and nodded, pushing the clasp in more firmly before scrambling to his feet.

"Come on then." He helped me up and then motioned for me to turn around, facing away from him. "Your turn, Tiger-Lily."

I heard him shuffling behind me, messing with something and then felt a light weight on my collarbone and Newt's fingers warm on the back of my neck as he fastened his pendant there. "Me too. I want it back – I'm attached to the ugly thing. Now, hey-"

Newt spun around in front of me. "This might be sappy as hell, but I really don't care at this bloody point. D'you remember what I said back when I fell out with ya' as a hormonal prat with exhaustion issues? When we get out of this place – out of this Trial, out of this base, out of this country, preferably – I will tear towns apart to help you find your Dad. Whatever you want, wherever he went. I promise ya'. And then we're gonna get away from here, go somewhere W.I.C.K.E.D will never find us. Daniel, Newt, Lily, Linnet, Isaac, Birdie, damn it all, we can be whoever we buggin' want, without anyone tracking our brains, without any zombie disease, without anything else. Okay? Promise me, Lily?"

"I promise."

Pushing up on my toes, I kissed him then, and even though I'd kissed Newt a hundred times by that misty evening in 2069, this wasn't like any of those times – not a fleeting brush of lips or a few passionate minutes stolen in an empty dorm room between classes. This was one that said all of the things we were afraid to, the things that would become real if we said them out loud: be careful. Be brave. But come back, come back, come back. How desperately we wanted what we'd promised to be reality – a reality I never stopped wanting, 17, 19, 21 years old. He didn't pull me forward, locking his arms around me as he often did, just cupped my head with one hand, my wristband brushing across my neck, and he splayed the fingers of the other across my back, holding me to him as I slid my fingers into his hair, the carved lizard resting between us. It was gentle, simple – now that I think about it, it was almost exactly like our first kiss. Certain. Safe. Newt's forehead was still resting against mine as he whispered:

"I'm sayin' it now, 'cause I don't want to blub in front of bloody Thomas and Teresa in the morning. Memories or not, I'm gonna miss you so buggin' much, okay? So, you go in there and – what was it your Ma used to say? – give 'em hell. And if it all goes to hell, just pin 'em to the ground."

I could hear the grin in his voice, even though it was thick with emotion and the London accent that always came with it. "You too. For what it counts, you're my favourite human. Inevitably. And I will personally flay the skin off your bones if you get yourself hurt."

Newt smirked, then spun away, moving back towards the path up to the main building, a pitying expression on his face. "Ugh, shame – see, I've always said my favourite person's Minho. Somethin' about his walk, ya' know?"

Without waiting to see my reaction, Newt turned and sprinted back up off the path and I flew after him with a battle-cry of my own, his laughter carrying back to me through the trees. He could run – I'd always catch up to him.

8:30 PM – The Gym

"At least I looked ripped in those photos though – I mean, did you see my arms, guys? You made fun of that Vest, but Subject A7 is the Ladies' Choice, I'm telling you now." Minho mimed tossing his hair back over his shoulder as everyone else groaned and rolled their eyes.

"Ach, might as well get in all of the leftover narcissism before tomorrow, hey, Min?" Minho leaned over and jokingly shoved Clint, pushing the Irish boy backwards off the cushions he was perched on amid spluttering laughter from the group.

As some kind of consolation prize, W.I.C.K.E.D had put tables of cake out in the Common Room, but as one final act of rebellion, we'd moved them into the gym where Nick, Annabelle, Borro and George were setting up an enormous centre-wide game involving a whole tub of ping-pong balls and some sails from the boat shed. The six of us were sitting in the far corner, trying to make light of our crappy situation - I don't know how well it was working, but we were giving it our best shot.

"God." Karly leant back, resting her head on my lap. "Aren't you glad we don't have to deal with all of their crap for a while, Lil? You're all so screwed – we'll see you in five years, lads – it'll take you that long to get dressed!"

Alby coughed something that sounded suspiciously like 'Camping Trip', and Karly tossed a cushion at his head as everyone giggled. "That was different. That was an emergency, you moron."

Clint was just handing out the extra blueberry muffins when Benjy's voice carried from the doorway: "LILY! Lily, can you come here a sec? Some kids want to talk to you."

The others looked across at me, their eyebrows raised in question, but I didn't know any more than they did.

"Okay, Benjy – tell them I'm coming!"

I gently pushed Karly off my lap onto Minho's, patting her head, and then, shrugging my shoulders at my friends, followed Benjamin into the corridor.

When I stepped out into the glass corridor, there were four people waiting for me. Gally was at the back, clearly shepherding again, but with him were Winston, Charlie and a sleepy-looking Chuck. It was Winston who moved first.

Winston had grown up a lot over the last few years – he came up to my shoulders now, Blankie had been relegated to a less obvious, but secure position on Winston's bed and, at ten years old, I could see him really fighting not to burst into tears. His black curls still flopped messily over his forehead as he shuffled up to me in his standard-issue pyjamas, the lisp almost gone from his voice:

"Is it really true? Are you all leaving, Lily?" His blue eyes were just as big as they had been that morning on the rattling train. I sighed and moved towards him, grabbing a nearby chair so I was on his level.

"Yes - yeah, I guess we are," Charlie made a gasping noise and scrambled over to sit in front of the chair, hugging the legs to get closer. "But not for long! Really, it's only for a while, Winnie – and we won't even really be gone. We'll still be here, the whole time. Just on a weird sub-level. We're not really going anywhere."

He looked unconvinced; his initial bravery seemed to be crumbling as he glanced at Charlie on the floor. Winston's lips trembled again as he refused to let me pull any wool over his eyes to soften the blow.

"But we can't see you. That's the same as being gone. Who will read us stories now? You make up the stories and Newt does the voices. That's the rules, Lily!"

"Oh, Winston…" I stretched my arms out then – ten or not, I wasn't letting anyone look that sad. His hesitation lasted all of two seconds as he flung his arms around me, squeezing with all of his might, almost pulling me backwards off the chair. "Look – Jeff's good at stories. That purple dinosaur one was his, remember? You thought that one was cool. And Gally can do voices!"

Gally flashed me a panicked expression which I met with a warning glance: just go along with it. It didn't matter, Winston still made a dissatisfied 'harumph' noise at the suggestion, his head still on my shoulder, before he finally got to the thing that was getting to him most.

"But we'll miss you… and maybe you won't miss us…"

"Oh no!" I pushed him away and looked at his face, pulling a tissue out of my pocket and wiping his nose which had run a little. "Honey, we're gonna miss you. So much. What am I going to do without my little brother? Hey? Pretty soon, you'll get to come and join in too, so you won't be here on your own. And I'm your sister, silly – I'm with you all the time, whether you can see me or not. And I wanna be your first hug the second we all finish this trial, okay? A proper, break-your-ribs, pick-me-up-off-the-floor hug. Do you promise?"

Winston blew his nose on the offered tissue and gave me his best grin through the teeth he was missing. "Promise."

Keeping hold of his hand, I dropped my voice to a whisper. "Also, Secret Agent Churchill. I hope you remember your instructions from Mission Control."

He nodded fiercely, dropping my hand so quickly it was almost comical and doing an army salute. "Yes, ma'am!"

"Repeat your instructions for the Top Secret Mission, Agent Churchill."

Winston glanced across to the gym windows where the boys inside were tossing ping-pong balls at each others' heads and shouting. He counted the rules off on his fingers.

"I get to look after your boys while you're not here – make sure that Alby doesn't get too bossy, Minho doesn't get too cocky and Newt doesn't get too sad. Hugs encouraged. Was that right, Lily?"

"Absolutely right. Do you think you can help him out with that one, Chuckie?" The smaller boy was still standing next to Gally, but he immediately broke into an ear-splitting smile and nodded, mimicking Winston's salute. "Yes, ma'am!"

"Good job, Agent Darwin." I reached across to shake his hand. "They're gonna need it."

"Who's gonna need what?" Minho and Newt appeared in the doorway, causing both Winston and Chuck to scream "INTRUDER, INTRUDER, SHUT DOWN MISSION CONTROL!" at the top of their little lungs.

In response to Newt and Minho's baffled expressions, I just said: "Top secret mission, boys. Sorry – your de-coding skills were too low to gain admission."

Winston giggled and blew a raspberry at Newt from behind my back, and the older boy immediately jumped over the chair I'd been sitting on and wrapped his arms around Winston's middle, picking him up off the floor and spinning him around, the little boy shrieking and laughing until Newt put him down and Chuck and Charlie clamoured around his feet, asking for a go. Minho swung Charlie onto his back and raced up and down the corridor making noises like a rodeo bull as the small girl screamed for him to go faster. It was only when Annabelle's voice echoed from inside, calling everybody into the gym that we all remembered where we were.

"Right then." Newt pushed the chair back against the wall and opened his arms. "Gotta go – group hug, Dorm 5!"

We all packed in, limbs tangling around limbs, people complaining about squashed body parts and not being able to see, but holding as tightly as possible to the candidates around them. I had just about enough room to twist around and stretch an arm out to Gally, who was loitering by the windows.

"Come on, you too. Your scrappy beard doesn't get you out of hugs, Leonis."

He sighed, like this was causing him physical pain, but wrestled his way into the hug with little complaint, mumbling something about how weird it was going to be without 'Mom and Dad' around.

The hugs and grumblings from the Babies of the centre would have been enough to cheer up even the surliest cynic, but it was Winston's goodbye that made my eyes fill up. It was something Minho had made up for the dorm to chant at the end of their bedtime stories, to make sure they all actually went to sleep rather than bouncing off the walls for three hours, but tonight, Winston switched out the 'goodnight' for:

"Bye-bye, brave warriors. Let all your adventures be awesome."

The game we all played in the gym was ridiculous. Out in the Common Room, the W.I.C.K.E.D operatives had put out games like Scrabble and Cluedo, with even the occasional chessboard to liven things up. Let's just say that was not what we were doing in the gym.

When you were a kid, did you ever play that game with the rainbow sheets? Where your teacher filled a rainbow coloured sheet of fabric the size of a small parking lot with plastic balls and got you to run under it as fast as you could? Where the sky would be a technicolour dream and you would race one of your classmates to the other side and collapse chortling uncontrollably, high on euphoria and the 'hokey-cokey'? That was a game that froze time.

Nobody wanted to be adults that night. We were all too aware of how quickly that possibility was dying - W.I.C.K.E.D had given us expiry dates on our childhoods, dated tomorrow. So, tired of brainteasers and maths exams, of Sense skills and hand-eye coordination, that game was what we played that night, with bits of old sail and ping-pong balls. There were almost fifty of us in that room, screaming and running into the centre, tripping over bits of sail, holding hands and shouting 'WOAH, THE HOKEY-COKEY!' until nobody could shout anymore, either because their throats had given up or their hysterical laughter eventually robbed them of their ability to speak.

When we left the room at 10PM, herded out by an irritated-looking Ava Paige, who thought we were 'young adults not children', we were sporting bruises, a few tear-stained faces, but there were smiles. I think it was that that really baffled W.I.C.K.E.D in the end. No matter what they told us, where they trapped us, we would defy their attempts to split us up by showing them how strong, and how happy, we were together.

The Next Morning – Day Zero – 6:50 AM

They gave us ten minutes.

We were standing in a part of the centre that we'd never been in before. It was white, like almost everything in this place, with a few scattered plastic chairs - it almost looked like a waiting room. At the far end of the room were glass doors, beyond which were the zones designated for the Swipe – the procedure that would rob us of our memories. The dentist-style chairs and surgical objects that I could make out through the doors sent shivers up my spine. We had been told to line up in our Subject Order (3-22) and were led up to this room in silence. Everyone was wearing the same lightweight T-shirts and black jeans, we'd been polished and primped within an inch of our lives, every bruise and scar on our body had to be marked on a digital model before we entered the Trial to ensure fair comparison between Subjects. Everyone had been hauled through the MRI scanner and given the same breakfast of cornflakes, orange juice and a solitary apple. We had to be comparable. They had let me keep Newt's necklace – why, I didn't know, but I wasn't complaining. I could see, from his identical position across the room that my Dad's bracelet was still on his wrist. I was glad. Even if he never remembered my face, this boy that I loved, at least he'd know my name.

There was a message up on the screens in front of us, with a timer below:

Good Morning Subjects

Welcome to Phase One of 'The Flare Trials'

You have 10:00 minutes remaining before Trial initiation – say your goodbyes and return to your lines immediately

Thank you, and good luck.

W.I.C.K.E.D

The message made it all sound very orderly, very structured. That was the last thing it was. Almost everyone in the room was crying - people were running around throwing their arms around people, even people they'd barely spoken to, wishing them good luck and goodbye. There were couples clinging onto each other in corners, whispered promises and gasping sobs ringing around the small room. We didn't look like a group of highly intelligent, rigorously trained fighters. We looked like frightened kids. I was suddenly glad that Newt and I had said our goodbyes yesterday – the ones that said everything we needed to say. There's no way I'd have been able to tell him anything in the few seconds we were snatching here.

Everything was a mass of people, I hugged person after person barely seeing them, yet desperately trying to hold onto their faces, even though I knew the next room would turn them into dust. Clint wrapped his arms around me: 'Look after yourself, sweetheart."

"Back at you, you muppet."

He smiled, squeezing my shoulder, then he disappeared and Minho was in his place. He squeezed me so tightly that I was losing the ability to breathe but held on as hard as I could.

"Put it there, Pasteur." Minho held up his hand and I slapped it. He pulled his hand back with a yelp, shaking it around through a smile. "If we meet again before this is over, gorgeous, just don't hit me in the balls, okay? Your left swing is freakin' nuts."

I nodded. "Good that. Try not to get too far up yourself in there."

"Will do." He grinned, before suddenly stepping a bit closer. "And, hey – keep an eye on Karl for me, will you? I mean, she's gonna kick some serious ass, but…"

Minho's black eyes wandered over to where Karly was hugging Anna. I reached out and rubbed his shoulder. "'Course I will. But she's gonna kick ass."

Jackson, Amy, George, Borro. More arms, good lucks and forced smiles.

The three years since we met hadn't made Alby any less intimidating. Nobody outside of our group went in for a hug. It was like trying to get your arms round a tree. But he immediately opened his arms when he saw me, hugging me tight before slapping me on the back for luck, almost sending me careening into Sophie and Mike. Alby's eyes lingered on Newt's necklace, before shifting over to where N had his arms around a sniffling Beth. He met my eyes and said quietly: "I'll look out for him, Lil. He's tough and he's my brother – memories or no memories, I'll work that out pretty fast. He'll be fine. Sock it to 'em, kid."

I smiled and, in a moment of bravery that I've always been glad I managed, pushed up onto my toes and kissed his cheek. "See you on the other side, Alby."

Karly threw herself into my arms at something approaching light speed. "Agh, I love you so much, sister. Don't forget that – oh my god, you have to forget that, that's the whole point!" She grabbed both my hands and squeezed them tight. "I better be your bestest friend in there, Pasteur, or so help me God, I'll kill you in your sleep."

"I love you too." And I did. Karly with her ruffled blonde hair, her big eyes and her razor-sharp tongue, I already loved her like a sister, before any of the worst case scenarios started to play out. "Who else will hyena-laugh with me at 3AM? You'll be my only one, no worries."

Sophie, Nick, Harriet, Sonya, Mariella, Benjamin, hugs and tissues and tears and two minutes on the clock.

Then all of a sudden I found myself standing in front of Newt. For a second, neither of us moved. My eyes roamed across his face, trying to etch his messy blonde hair, his square jaw, his dark eyes into my memory – how could anyone ever call that colour 'chocolate brown'? I wondered vaguely. Who could ever be that unobservant? As I studied them, flecks of amber and russet and gold shifted across them every time he blinked and I felt his eyes fixed on my face just as closely.

We didn't cry. We didn't promise undying love, or marriage or our imminent parting resembling death. We just moved together wordlessly, Newt's arms going around my back, folding me tightly into his chest as I twined mine around the back of his neck like always. And like always, he lifted me up off the floor, so I could rest my head on his shoulder, his arms so much stronger than they had been three years ago. N was powerful now as well as fast. He's strong enough. Of course he is. Determined not to cry as Ava Paige and Thomas and Teresa moved between the candidates with their cameras and their clipboards, I blinked back the tears that were burning behind my eyelids. This is one of just a few moments in my life (almost all of them involving Newt) where I'd have given anything to just freeze time. To stay there in his arms, in the warmth and familiarity and certainty and all that that meant. After everything we'd done together, I was suddenly terrified that this would be it. This was all I got of this person.

Just as the clock reached thirty seconds, Newt turned his head and whispered in my ear, so low that Minho just behind him couldn't catch the words: 'I love you, Lilybird. 'S a bloody inevitable. Remember?"

I nodded, and like that night in Year One, when I'd waltzed around the Canteen, balancing on Newt's feet, I could feel his heartbeat hammering through his shirt. I placed my feet on the ground and moved my hand to his chest. "Yes - I love you. And I'll find you, Newt. The second that I can, I swear I'll find you."

The clock clicked to zero and a klaxon screeched around the hall, everyone jumping away from each other in their rush to cover their ears. It was time to go. Newt squeezed the hand that I still had in his and murmured, 'Good that', before letting go and moving over to stand between George and Alby, taking his ID card out of his pocket to hand to the surgeon on the other side of the doors. I took my place behind Annabelle, my free hand clasping the lizard at my throat as Ava Paige started calling us through. When Ava called Annabelle and George, I looked across at Newt, sudden panic filling my chest, to find him looking straight back at me. As Ava Paige called out our names, Newt flashed me the same crooked smile that he'd showed me that day on the train, giving a mock salute before we walked through the glass doors to have our lives erased.

It hurts to think that the next time I saw Newt, there was a time-bomb ticking in his brain.

  
  



	21. Accidents, A5 and Shattered Ankles

**Chapter 21 – Accidents, A5 and Shattered Ankles**

**TWO YEARS LATER – The Maze – Lily's P.O.V**

"Beep – Beep – Beep – Beep – Beep!"

I scrabbled around, knocking my wristwatch off the rickety bedside table and into the blanket of leaves on the Glade floor, still beeping like an unexploded bomb, just like it did every morning, dragging me out of dreams that made just as much sense as my life when I was awake.

"Oh, stick it!"

The watch got louder every few seconds, the beeps getting closer together, until it emitted a continuous shriek that grated its way into your skull. My bleary eyes caught sight of a flash of red in the dust and I pounced on it just as Fi was starting to stir, almost tripping over Sadie in my attempt to silence the watch before somebody else woke up and smashed it. The digital face read 05:30, just like it did every morning. Or every morning for the last two years at least. I often wondered how I'd woken up before that. Did my parents wake me up with a glass of milk and a smile? Was I left sleeping, waiting for the sun to filter in and open my eyelids itself? Or was it just another alarm that I didn't want to hear?

It was cool as I padded out of the forest and into the open Glade, a slight breeze rustling the leaves and sending a hollow rushing noise through the Maze itself, echoing off the Walls like water in a pipe, just so you never forgot where you were, even in the stumbling, fuzzy-round-the-edges, first throes of daylight. At 5:30 in the morning, the Glade was always still – unless you drifted towards the Barn and heard the lowing of the animals or the sleepy snuffling of our resident Border Collie, Barney (we were an original bunch in the Glade), or if you drifted towards the closed Doors and heard the scratching of a final Griever out past its bedtime. We'd stopped doing that.

Today was no different: none of the lights were on in the Homestead and only the sounds of quiet breathing carried from the areas of the forest where people slept as I made my way across the Glade to the concrete Trackers' Room by the Eastern Door. This had been one of the only things here when the first twenty of us woke up around the metal Cage in the centre of the Glade with no possessions, no memories and no way out – a piece of A4 paper taped to the Cage doors with arrows, labels and the words 'WELCOME TO THE GLADE – THE CREATORS' scrawled across it. One arrow pointed to the Trackers' Room (then labelled the 'Paper Store'), another to the Homestead and a third to the Prison in the forest. Isn't it depressing that even communities that don't remember human civilisation need a prison?

I scrambled over a mishmash of chairs and cutlery that littered the floor around the campfire, the detritus of last night's party to welcome the new Baby who came up in the Cage yesterday morning. This one's name was Charlie – a fragile-looking girl with an elfin face and dark eyes who'd barely said a word all afternoon. A flicker of concern went through me at the memory; I'll check on her later. Harriet and Sonya – our heads of camp – looked after the Babies on Day One, but after that, as the Captain of the Medics and the second-in-command (third, depending on what you're counting), they were my job. And I was more worried about this one than most - usually my problem was getting them to stop talking and start learning, not getting them to speak at all – and Charlie seemed younger than the rest of us. I guessed I was about eighteen or nineteen, and nobody was looked much older than that, but this girl couldn't have been any more than twelve years old. I'll check on her later.

The Trackers' Room was made of huge concrete blocks, the kind they build motorway bridges with and the only entrance was a submarine-style door with a heavy metal steering-wheel for a handle. I pushed up to spin it – seven clicks to the right and two left – but a sudden wave of nausea swept through me and I staggered backwards, my fingers slipping off the wheel that I'd spun hundreds of times before. What? I looked around to see if anyone had noticed whatever that was, but the Glade remained deserted as the sky got gradually lighter. A strange feeling had settled in my stomach, thick and roiling, putting me on edge – what was that? I shook my head, trying to dissipate it with common sense. It almost felt like fear, like panic, like something was going to happen. But nothing was. Nothing ever did – that was the whole point. I was opening up the Tracker Room to log today's stuff for the Trackers, like I had done every morning for as long as I could remember.

"Weird." I muttered, reaching up to my wooden lizard pendant and rubbing its head, steadying myself before grabbing the wheel with both hands and spinning it seven clicks to the right and two to the left so the door swung open. There. Now, business as usual. I slipped through the door, leaving it open behind me and shot a glance at the clock on the far wall of the windowless room. 5:45. The Trackers would be in soon – I heaved down the wooden chest from the top shelf and swung it onto the table in the centre of the room, pulling out the contents. Twelve pairs of running trainers of various sizes, packs of blister plasters (which we quickly learned to ask for), sketchpads, pencils, water flasks and twenty-one pairs of socks, plus three odd ones with holes in. I switched the three strays out and put three new pairs in while sorting the objects into twelve piles on the table in front of each Tracker's name: Karly, Sophie, Amy, Fiona, Joni, Raven, Jules, Orla, Nora, Marnie, Ann, and Elle. I picked up the final board and put a line through Elle's name and started filling up the flasks just as Karly swung in through the door with Amy, Fiona and Gwen on her heels.

"Morning, Lil!" Fiona bounced up to me to take her bundle, her usual energy clearing the last cobwebs of sleep from my mind. Amy winced at the shout and put a hand to the side of her head.

"Ugh, do we have to speak at bluebird pitch this early, Fi? I felt that…"

I laughed at her raised eyebrows and tossed Fiona the shoelace missing from her left trainer. "Morning Fi – I didn't, so clearly somebody drank too much punch last night."

Amy just groaned and took her stuff, sinking to the floor to do up her trainers. Mariella was in charge of cooking in the Glade – and her scrambled egg skills were fantastic – but whatever she put in the apple juice on party nights was absolutely lethal. Karly was less than impressed as she strapped on her running harness:

"I told everyone one glass, girls – it's a good thing you're pairing with Joni today, Ames, otherwise you could end today locked in Section Eight with a Griever to play with. Any more stunts and I'll switch you with Grace – she's sprinting as fast as Harri now."

Amy just muttered an apology, avoiding the gaze of the Captain of the Trackers. When Karly wasn't looking, I slipped her a vitamin tablet and a flask of honeyed water under the table.

In most of the Glade jobs, people had been switched around a lot as other people arrived – the Captain of the Scaffolds had changed at least three times in the past year and Jenny switched with Beth for Captain of the Gardens last month, but that never happened with the Captain of the Trackers. The only other Captain had been Annabelle. Annabelle, whose grave you could see from the Homestead windows. Karly, as her second, had taken over after that - as fast mentally as she was on her feet, fair and tough as nails, nobody ever questioned her. She'd become my closest friend almost immediately; we'd woken up in the Glade next to each other, and when you've cried in a stranger's arms, watched people die from incurable stings (or so we thought at first) and then had to get up and add a wing to the Homestead with some rusty nails and what look like floorboards, you become pretty close. And also, when she wasn't chewing out her Trackers for messing around, Karly was hilarious. This morning, she took the smaller girl who was hovering in the doorway and pushed her towards me.

"Lil, here's Gwen – I told her you'd fix her up and give her the fluffy socks and the lowdown on the joys of being a Tracker and how we all go and watch movies in the Griever den until the Doors close."

Gwen was slightly shorter than Karly and a little younger – maybe sixteen – but she was clever, determined and fast, even if she was looking at Karly that morning like the Captain might suddenly spin and bite her. I beckoned her over and wrote her name where Elle's had been. She watched me, worry clouding her face for a second and I jumped in before she took that train of thought any further and couldn't actually go out of the Doors.

"Gwen, you saw Elle last night, right? She slipped outside Section Four – she's broken her wrist and I can't have her running and jolting the cast. Plus, her maps would be rubbish." Gwen attempted a small smile – she had clearly not seen Elle and Karl hadn't filled her in. "That's why we're swapping you in, honey. Nothing's happened to a Tracker out there for a long time – right, guys?"

The other Trackers chimed in with 'yes's and 'yeah's, nodding enthusiastically at the younger girl, probably remembering their first days on the job.

Karly grinned and rubbed Gwen's shoulder. "And, if you hate the job and my guts by the time Elle's fixed up, we'll swap you back out, 'kay, kiddo?"

She nodded firmly, taking the package from my hands and starting to put on the gear. "I can do it."

"We know you can – Karly doesn't pick sissies." I was scrabbling around at the bottom of the shoe cupboard for the right-sized trainers. "Ah, found them! Right, there you go – got your lunch from Kitchen? Great. You'll track with Karl today and she'll show you how to map it all when you get back. You'll be brilliant, Gwen. And you do get cool socks."

I stood up out of the cupboard to get the clipboard for signing out, when my vision suddenly misted at the edges, clouding out the Trackers around the edge of the table and the sick feeling surging up into my chest and a stabbing feeling starting in the back of my head, like a needle.

"Whoa, Lil?" Karly stepped round Joni and Marnie on the floor and held my wrists. "What's up, sis?"

"I don't – I can't-" The mist cleared and I could see Raven perching on the table and holding out her water flask with a look of concern. The feeling settled back down into my stomach and I took Karly's hands, squeezed and then stepped back. "I'm fine – stood up too fast. Weird. No, I'm seriously fine. Let's go, or you're going to miss the Doors."

Karly looked unconvinced and watched me carefully as we trooped out to the Eastern door, where the Track always began, but since I didn't know any more than she did and I really was right about the Doors – if the Trackers were late getting out, it would throw off their whole day – she just nodded. "Alright. Don't overdo it on the idiots with splinters or diarrhoea today, okay? I'll see you later, Lil. Let's do this, Gwen."

I ticked their names off the list as the last to go out and, as they got to the first bend, Karly turned and shouted: 'I love you!" down the ivy-clad corridor. I don't know if my laughter carried across to her or if it dissolved in the wind that was blowing towards the Glade, but I called back to her anyway: 'I love you too!' as they disappeared into the Maze.

Lunchtime

At lunch, after I'd done the rounds up at the Homestead, checked Elle's wrist and set Jessie's broken finger in the Gardens, I went to find Charlie. It wasn't difficult – she was sitting at the edge of Harri and Sonya's table, curled up with her knees against her chest, listening to their conversation without speaking –Sonny cast me a despairing glance and shrugged her shoulders. I slid onto the bench opposite the tiny girl with a spare piece of Mariella's cake in my hand.

"Hey Charlie."

She jumped and her gaze flew to me, her eyes wide, too big for her face. She looked like she might have been crying; my heart ached and I hated the Creators a little bit more for sending someone so young into hell.

"Hi." Her voice was a whisper as she looked up at me under her sheet of wispy auburn hair.

"I'm Lily, by the way. I'm a Medic." She nodded.

"I know."

There were two types of Babies in the Glade – the ones who ran around panicking, shouting and asking a thousand questions in the space of a minute (98% of which we wished we had the answers to ourselves) and the ones who said nothing at all, their brains forming a protective shell against the sensory overload. Though infinitely more disruptive, the panickers were so much easier. I smiled at the little girl and pushed the plate of cake across to her with a spork next to it.

"Harriet and Sonny brought you in so early, you missed the cake, which is a travesty, obviously. You can't have a Tour of the Glade without cake – it's the best part."

She said nothing but reached out her hand and pulled the plate of cake the rest of the way across the table, picking up the spork.

"Did you get on okay on the Tour?"

Charlie nodded.

"Meet everyone in the Homestead? Beth and Hannah? They're pretty nice."

Another nod.

"The Gardens? Probably not the best day to go there, to be honest – they're laying manure this week, right?"

Another nod, but this time with a wrinkling of the nose.

"Did you see the animals? I think Samantha was saying one of the pigs had piglets yesterday."

"It did. They're really really small, like guinea pigs, but pink ones." Charlie brushed her hair back and looked at me properly, her dark eyes meeting mine. "I liked the dog."

Bingo! Animals were clearly the way in. "Barney? He's lovely. Did Harri and Sonya tell you about what he did when we first got here?"

"No. What did he do? Has he always been here?" She was interested now, the spork discarded on the table.

"Oh yeah – all the animals were. He was smaller then, though. No, have you seen the metal lizards on the walls? The Beetle Blades? There was one with a funny tail when we first started - it had some exposed wires that flapped or something – and Barney used to chase it. All the time, it was so annoying. We'd be trying to use him to get the sheep in for the night and he'd vanish up into the forest after this weird Beetle. And it used to mess with him – or whoever controls it did – it'd climb up onto the Walls where he couldn't reach it and he'd wriggle like a caterpillar in mid-air trying to catch it, but miss and just collapse in a ball of fuzz at the bottom like a slinky."

She giggled. "Aww."

"Uh huh, and one day it was running in circles around the lake – I think the Creators just gave up on that Beetle and let it have fun – and it suddenly dodged and jumped across onto the lilypads in the middle of the lake. Barney immediately tried to follow it and jumped on a lilypad too, but obviously, he sank and ended up in the middle of the lake, splashing around and whining 'cause he lost the lizard. When he got out, we called him Spike because his fur stuck up everywhere – and when it dried, he was really really fluffy, it was so funny. He sat by the lake, looking like a ball of cotton wool, barking at the water for hours."

Charlie was properly laughing now, and Harri looked down the table and gave me a thumbs up, before pointing at Charlie and back at me. Take her with you. I nodded back at her.

"Awww, poor Barney! And he never got the lizard?"

"Nope, never." I stood up and scraped the crusts from my sandwich into one of the nearby bins. "Right – eat your cake and then you can show me the piglets. I've never seen a pink guinea pig."

Charlie didn't look completely settled yet, her eyes still full of the trepidation that the Babies held onto until at least the third month with us, but at least she was smiling. She looked down at the spork in her hand as she started eating the chocolate cake with renewed gusto, before glancing back up with a questioning expression.

"So, they're smart enough to give you lizards with computers in them, but they're stupid enough to give you sporks?"

Later that afternoon

"What's that round your neck?"

After we'd seen the animals, I took Charlie back with me to the Homestead to sort out the Medical Inventory for the month – we were cutting bandages into strips in the armchairs in the living room for the few hours we had before the Trackers came back in and the Gladers met for dinner. The little girl had been talking more and more, telling me all the animal facts she'd learnt that morning and finally, all the questions that everyone has when they wake up in the Glade started to come out – I'd answered some, fielded others, but this was one that I both could and couldn't answer.

"My lizard?" I reached up and undid the knot at the nape of my neck, letting the necklace fall apart in my hand and moved a little closer, so the girl could see it. It was a wooden carving on a faded leather string. The carving was poor, done by someone whose calling clearly wasn't woodwork, but it appeared to be some kind of lizard with bulging eyes and three toes on each foot. On the back of the lizard, a single letter was carved: 'N', filled in with black paint.

"Where did it come from?"

That was a question I'd asked myself a million times, and I came up with a new answer for it every day: It was a present from my mother when I was a little girl, a gift left by the woman in the Glade before us – the one whose picture was framed in the Homestead, a weird thing thrown in by the Creators to confuse us even further, maybe even something I'd made for myself – which would definitely explain how weirdly shaped it was. I'd clung to it when we first arrived here, staring at it without blinking, staring at it until my eyes burned, just trying to feel something, somewhere in my head – a memory or a reason or even just a face, but there was nothing. Nothing but a misshapen wooden lizard.

"I don't know. I had it when I got here."

"Is it from…before?"

I sighed. "I think so. I'm not sure…I don't really like people touching it – it feels wrong. Like it's important, like it's part of me or something. But that might just be me making stuff up, 'cause I want to believe it – not having memories can do that to you, you know?"

Charlie nodded sagely and quickly pulled her hand back from where she'd been tracing the letter on the back. "Don't worry, you can touch him – that's not what I meant."

She went back to the lizard, picking it up like it was glass and running her fingers over the carving. "So, you don't know what 'N' means?"

"No." That hadn't stopped me wondering. "At first, we thought it was a clue, something to do with the Maze, but then we never found anything like it, so that doesn't really make sense anymore. It's probably an initial, I think."

"Like your Mom or Dad?"

"Maybe. I think that some days. I try to guess what their names could be – Nora or Nigel or Nancy or Nicholas. Sometimes I wonder whether it's me, maybe my surname or my middle name: Nelson or Natalie or something. Karly – the Captain of the Trackers – thinks it's a secret boyfriend, but-"

"Pfffft!" Charlie burst out into giggles at the mention of 'boyfriends'.

"Exactly." I nodded and scooped up the necklace, tying it back around my neck and feeling a little more secure as I did so. "So, no, I don't know – I hope I get to know someday. But I like him. If I'm stressed about anything, I can touch his head to calm down. It sounds silly, but it works. That's why his head's so shiny now."

Charlie reached out and rubbed the lizard's head against my collarbone. "Oooh, he's smooth!"

"Uh-huh. You can touch his head for luck too, if you want. Now, we'd better finish these bandages in the next few minutes - the Trackers'll be back in soon and I'll have to sign them off and you'll have to report to Harriet and Sonya to get your job for tomorrow."

Charlie went back to cutting bandages into rectangles for a while, humming quietly – a melody that neither of us remembered the words to – until she eventually fell silent, her fingers stilling on the bandages.

"Lily?"

"Mmm?"

"Is this a prison?"

"Whoa - no! Unless you're a secret serial killer, in which case, let me know so I can make sure you're not sleeping anywhere near me."

She giggled. "No. I didn't really think so… I'm just trying to think of a worst case scenario so anything else will be better. Or at least a reason that makes sense, so my head stops hurting so much."

You and me and all of us. "There isn't one, really. That's why we have to try and escape, so we can work it out. And hey, if outside sucks, we can always come back here. At least we'd know then."

"It could be a hospital? Maybe we're all sick? Maybe they've sent us to the countryside so we get better? I read a book about that once. I don't remember what it was called."

"Could be. I sure hope I'm better after two years – but I like that idea, that's a nice one."

I hadn't wanted to mention that most hospitals – what I could remember of them anyway – didn't have half-animal half-machine Griever hybrids wandering the corridors to keep the patients in and eat the ones that tried to sign out. But I didn't want to shatter any of few nice ideas she'd have in this place – plus, with the way I'd been feeling today, the strange feeling staying cold in my stomach, making me jump a foot every time somebody closed a door, she could be right.

"Lily?" Harriet appeared in the doorway. She'd been hauling the sacks in the Garden before taking inventory and re-distributing Gladers between job sectors today – she looked tired and there was a smudge of dirt across her forehead. "Mind if I steal your helper? I need to plan out her Trial week with the Captains."

"Sure. Go on, Charlie – I'll catch up with you at dinner, we're almost done here anyway." She climbed down from the chair reluctantly and went to stand by Harriet, the look of trepidation back in her eyes.

"She's a pretty good medic, Harri. I've never seen anyone cut those up so neatly – I've still got some funny-shaped ones from when Jenna did her Trial day – but I think Barney and the piglets might be disappointed if you put her over here…"

I let my voice trail off into the hint and Charlie flashed me a hopeful smile. Harriet just grinned wryly and nodded. "Is that so? Well, I could always put you with Edie over in the Barn tomorrow and see how you sticks get on. Thanks, Lil."

"No worries." Harriet steered Charlie off upstairs to the Office in the middle room (which consisted of a table, three beanbags and some A4 folders) and Iona (my second) and I rolled the bandages and distributed them round the Glade in the listed First Aid kits. When I'd dumped the spares in the Tracker Room cupboard, I still had half an hour to kill before the Trackers even started coming back in, so I wandered across to the lake south of the forest, chatting and calling out to various Gladers as I went and stopping to put antiseptic on Rani's hand where she'd trapped it in the door of the Bathroom.

The lake was something else that had always just been there and we'd used it for all sorts – watering the animals, sourcing herbs and even closing our eyes and swimming underwater to see if it held some way out. Like everything else here, there wasn't even a clue. When we'd first arrived, the pool had been clear – you could see all the way to the polished grey stones that covered the bottom and the few fish that darted around below the surface – but now, pondweed and lilypads covered the surface in misshapen splodges and there were lizards, snails and even a couple of frogs in the foliage. I often came and sat there in the evenings and watched the tiny insects and animals milling around – they looked so much freer than I felt. There was something calming around the rhythm of the silvery fish flitting about just below the surface and more than once, I'd fallen asleep there and had to be woken by a passer-by before Mariella ran out of mashed potatoes for dinner.

The lake was fairly quiet that evening – I could hear some of the frogs chirruping away to themselves, and the buzzing of the dragonflies that occasionally skipped across the surface – but the fish were hidden away in the reeds at the edges of the pool, or the amid the haze of dust at the bottom. The shouts of Trackers regrouping were echoing back through the Maze corridors. I lazily watched a green lizard pick its way across a wide piece of grass and wondered whether anything had changed today, as I twisted my own lizard on his leather strap. Changed more than corridor 40 opening and blocking off corridor 39. The lizard dropped into the water with a 'splish' no louder than the sound of a tiny pebble. I wondered whether anything would change or whether I'd just keep settling Babies and bandaging fingers until I was as old as the woman in the Homestead photograph. Maybe that was how you died? Mothering and hoping and wondering. Maybe that's how I'll die? When I dreamt, I'd dreamt of places where girls like Charlie could go to a zoo for fun or ride horses or keep guinea pigs of whatever colour she liked. The lizard reached the edge of a lilypad and hooked its toes on, sliding onto the plant and wriggling.I dreamt that the world was more than this. The newt on the lilypad pattered around, lying down for a second before deciding that spot wasn't a warm enough spot and shimmying forwards until he was right in the centre and lay down in a slat of sunlight that filtered in through the reeds.

"There you go." I whispered. "It's sunny if you stay there, newt."

Unsurprisingly, the newt didn't reply, just blinked its dark eyes up at me from the lilypad. So, I'm talking to newts now, that' s just – wait.

Newts. A newt on a lilypad. A newt on a lilypad. Why does that - and that's when the voices filled my head and everything went dark.

The sky is blue. So blue it hurts my eyes. But what does it matter, what does it bloody matter what colour the shucking sky is? I'm high up, so high, and I can see the top of the Walls and all of the Sections stretching out beyond them. There's someone climbing the ivy up there, a silhouette against the frozen sky.

A voice, thick with fury and an accent familiarly alien and just out of reach. "I don't know who you people are, but I hope you're happy. I hope you get a real buggin' kick out of watching us suffer. And then you can die and go to hell. This is on you."

Then suddenly they're gone. The person vanishes and only is the sky is there. Only the sky and the sickening crack that echoes off the stone of the corridors. The person vanishes and there's a crack and I'm on fire. Every fibre, every cell of my body aches and pain, pure agony is blazing up my leg, the right side of my body. I'm on fire and I'm crying, why am I crying?

More voices: "Shit, A5! He's fucking jumped, goddamnit! Who was watching that monitor?"

"I hate you. I hate you!"

"Shit, shit. If he dies, the patterns – shit, he's our best Control! Thomas'll-"

"No – no, wait –my God, he's survived the impact! Look at this, he isn't bleeding, there's no internal damage. Ugh, he's screwed up that leg, for sure, but as long as they get him back in within the next twenty minutes, he'll be fine. We can turn the Grievers off the kid anyway. We'll send up some med supplies with tomorrow's Box."

"Lucky bugger."

"Yeah… wouldn't have guessed that one, though. He's their Keeper, isn't he? A5?"

"Not after this, he's not. Bet you ten bucks it'll be that Asian kid next, A7? But, yeah, A5 always seemed the big brother type – upbeat, you know? If anyone was gonna jump, I'd pick that kid who got stung last week? Gally – A36? Not this one."

"Wait, Clark, come over here – there's something weird going on with B5's implant…what the hell?"

"What's it doing?"

"I don't know. It's freezing or something, she's down, but I can't see why. Her implant's undamaged, it should be working."

"That's weird, isn't it? I wonder what – hang on, is A5's implant damaged? Did he hit his head just now?"

"I'll just ch - yeah, actually, yeah. It's stable enough to finish the Trial, but a few of the circuits are sparking, why?"

"A5 and B5. Thomas said they were joined at the freaking hip – their memories overlap pretty heavily. That means we used the same blockers on both kids. If his are sparking, they could well be affecting her functions."

"Oh – yep, there it is. Look, that's it. Makes sense – both down in the same minute. 4:36. Impressive."

"Are we sending people to fix her up? B5?"

"No. Too many uncalculated Variables."

"But if she remembers, Walter…"

"She can't –won't be more than flashes. There's no way in hell they can remember each other. Might create some interesting blueprints, though."

And then the person again. But they're not at the top of the Walls, they're at the bottom. I can't see the sky anymore. Don't cry, why are you crying? I see you, I can see you. Their leg is twisted at an impossible angle in the dust and shadows of the Walls, of the Doors that are waiting to close. And I am on fire. Oh, don't, don't cry, I can see you. I've seen you before.

"I love you, Lilybird. 'S a bloody inevitable."

I've heard and not heard that voice a thousand times before.

"Remember?"

No. Don't you know that I don't? But I'm trying – don't leave.

"I love you, Lilybird…promise me, Lily?"

The sun was bright. So bright it hurt my eyes. I'm crying, why am I crying? I need to wake up, I need to help you, I need to-

"Lily? Are you okay? Lil? Lil!"

Karly. The afternoon sun lit her hair with gold, framing her concerned expression and wide eyes. Why is she here? I haven't signed anyone through the Doors.

"Karl…I'm fine, I'm - what time is it?"

The Doors. Why were the Trackers here? I always sign them in through the Doors – if Karly's here, they must be closing soon, the light's going. They must be closing soon. A bolt of what I can only describe as inexplicable terror shot through me and I was on my feet, staggering, before Karly could answer, before I could explain, before we could lose any time.

"There's someone outside the Walls!" My throat closed up; I wanted to run, to the Walls, to the person, but they were blocking my way and I could hardly stand.

"What?" Karly was frowning now, stepping towards me. "Honey, you just-"

"No!" She reached out for me but I pushed her away, surprise written across her face. "No! This isn't about me – I can't explain it! You've got to believe me, there is someone outside the Walls! Somebody fell, something happened, there's somebody there, I saw them."

"The Trackers are all in, what do you mean you-"

"Karly!"

She must have seen it in my face. In the two years of friendship, where I'd raised my voice once before a Banishment. In my ragged breathing, the swaying on my feet, the panic that my whole body was radiating. This wasn't a joke. And I knew it. I couldn't explain how I knew it, but I was more certain of this than I had been of anything that had happened in the Glade, than the people standing in front of me. Karly let her arms fall to her side and turned to the Trackers who had gathered behind her.

"The Doors don't close for another fifteen minutes. Fi, Raven, Joni – we'll do a lap. All the way round the inner Walls, do you understand me?"

The three Trackers cast uneasy glances from their watches to me and Karly.

"Please." Even I could hear how desperate I sounded, and frustration welled up in my chest, almost followed by tears. God, if they don't go, I will. But, at my plea, the three stepped forward and Karly looked back, meeting my eyes, the frown still etched into her forehead, but she nodded once and took off at a run for the Eastern Door, the other three on her heels.

Their leg twisted at an impossible angle in the dust and the shadows of the Walls. I'm crying, why am I crying?

"Lily?" Charlie was at my side, a cup of water in her hand, dispelling the vision that was already fading. "I think you should drink this?"

She was watching me with the same eyes that Karly had, wide and worried. I could barely tear my own away from the Eastern door, but I managed to take the drink from her and swallow half as she helped me away from the pond and towards the Cage at the centre of the Glade. "Thank you…who's the Medic now?"

Charlie managed an uncertain smile. "I want to help with the animals."

My confusion only deepened when I reached up to rub my eyes - my face was completely dry. I'm not crying. So, who was?

As we made it to the centre, Harriet and Sonya came running towards us from the Homestead.

"Lil?" Sonya's thick hair had come loose from the band she'd pulled it back with and pieces were falling around her face. "What's going on? Why are Trackers going into the sticking Maze? We've got ten minutes!"

I held up the hand that wasn't balancing on Charlie's shoulder. "I know – I know. They're lapping the Walls, there's somebody out there. They'll be back."

"What?" Harriet looked just as confused. "Who? Didn't they all come back the first time? How do you know?"

"I – agh – I can't explain it! There's somebody there, I saw them, I heard them. There's someone there, I know there is."

"There!" A crowd of Gladers, also seeing the strange occurrence, had gathered around the Cage by now and it was Beth who shouted, pointing towards the Western Door. Karly was sprinting back towards us, her face scarlet and her shoulders heaving. Fiona, Joni and Raven collapsed on the ground behind her as she skidded to a halt. They're alone – why are they alone?

"What are you doing? You need help – I'll help you get them-"

"No." Karly, still bent double, leaning on her knees and breathing hard, raised her hand. "Lil, there's no-one there. We went all the way around – unless she's the size of sticking Tom Thumb, there's nobody out there. All the Trackers signed off, Iona did it 'cause we couldn't find you. You fainted, honey, it's hot out today. You need to sit down and rest."

"No…there's someone out there. There's got to be." I must have sounded like a raving lunatic, standing in the middle of the Glade, swaying like a scarecrow in a tempest and running my hands through my hair, repeating the same four words over and over. I felt like I'd aged three decades in thirty minutes and I was going to throw up any second, but I couldn't stop. We had seven minutes.

Only the sky and the sickening crack that echoes off the stone of the corridor. I'm on fire. Oh don't, don't cry.

"What if it's not a Tracker? What if someone wandered out in the day and couldn't get back?" I scrabbled in my pocket for the metal whistle that only Captains had, that we'd requested from the Creators after Annabelle died, and blew it – one long whistle and three short ones. Wait two seconds. Repeat.

"Lily, it's the number one rule-" Harriet tried to protest, but Gladers were already pouring out of the forest and buildings towards the Cage in response to the whistle that they would be imprisoned for ignoring.

"Harriet, rules are there because people break them. We need a headcount. There should be forty-eight."

The Camp Leaders had no response to that. The people filtered in and I wanted to scream at them to move faster – don't you see, I have to prove it – but as soon as they were within hearing distance, Sonya called:

"Gladers! Get into your groups, count off! One!"

I stepped up next to her. "Two!"

"Three!" Karly slipped her arm through mine, keeping me steady.

"Four!" Harriet.

"Five!" Mariella.

All the way through – Scaffolders, Gardeners, Handlers, Bobbies, Medics, Cleaners, Cooks – in just a couple of minutes, but it felt like a year until Beth called "forty-seven!", followed by Jenna's "forty-eight!"

Forty-eight. We were all here. They were all safe. Forty-eight, forty-eight. The number should have calmed me, but it didn't. And then you can die and go to hell. This is on you…I hate you, I hate you! There had to be somebody there. But everyone was here. Forty-eight. Forty-eight.

"I-you don't get it, I'll go, I'll check-"

A boom sounded across the Glade, ricocheting off every surface, somehow louder than it had ever been before, whipping itself into a gale in my ears and sounding like the fire of a thousand cannons. 5:00. The Doors had closed. That noise always seemed like a prison sentence, but that night, I felt it like a bruise.

At that moment, all the energy, all the fight drained out of me, like the last grains of sand in an egg timer and I sank to the floor, my head on my knees. I'm on fire. The sick feeling was back, spreading up through my chest and I imagined it seeping into my veins, into my bloodstream until it was all I could feel. But it wasn't – I was sad too. And not just the kind of sad that we all felt here sometimes, the gloomy, hopeless kind of sad, but sad like I'd lost something - that something in me, something I loved but couldn't name, had broken and I'd been powerless to stop it.

That evening

After everything that happened at Closing Time, Karly, Sonya and Harriet had helped me to the kitchen and Mariella had forced mashed potato and apple juice down my throat (the regular kind). I'd tried to tell them what had happened, what I'd seen, but they didn't want to hear it.

"Come and see us tomorrow." Harri had said. "Sleep on it, girl. Maybe it'll all make sense then."

I doubted it. I had seen somebody outside the Walls, and there was nobody there, yet I just didn't see how my tired brain could have spun something so vivid and so real whilst I fainted from dehydration. But for now, I'd decided to take their advice and was sitting in my hammock in the forest with extra blankets and a bottle of water. I was so tired and my head was aching, a sharp stabbing pain flaring up every time I moved my head too quickly; how had I – me, whose sole job in the Glade is to heal - managed to put the whole camp in danger by sending people out into the Maze before the Doors closed? But why had I been so sure? Absentmindedly, I reached up and spun my lizard pendant around my fingers. And froze. A newt on a lilypad. That's it, that's what I'd seen – and I had been holding the pendant. Quickly, I pulled the necklace off and balanced the lizard in the palm of my hand, staring at it harder than I had when we first arrived in the Glade. That person wasn't all that I'd seen:

"Who was watching that monitor?"

"A5 always seemed the big brother type – upbeat, you know?"

"Their memories overlap pretty heavily…"

"There's no way they can remember each other…"

That voice, familiarly alien:

"I love you, Lilybird. 'S a bloody inevitable. Do you remember?"

And:

"Promise me, Lily?"

As I sat there, the voices coming back to me in my hammock in the simulated forest, fighting their way through a copycat forest of thorns in my mind, filtering through, I heard another voice, one that didn't come from that dream. A different voice – my own voice. My own laughter.

"I promise."

What? What do I promise? Who do I promise? But then I turned the pendant over in my hand, tracing the painted 'N' and he was there, in the centre of my mind. A boy. He isn't exactly handsome, but his dark eyes, fair hair and square jaw make him striking. His hair is messy, dark blond and dishevelled, falling over his eyes, which are large and deep brown – sometimes the same russet colour as the doors of the Cage, gathering rust over the months, sometimes matching the fresh bark on the oak trees in our forest or the overturned rows in the Garden – and full of expression. His mouth is slightly curved at the edges, like it took him more effort to keep his face straight than it would do to give in to a natural, if slightly crooked, grin. Are you A5? A7? A36? Numbers swirling in a conversation that just evaded my memory. He was N. Don't ask me how I knew it. Don't ask me how I knew anything in the Maze, or even after it. I didn't know what that letter stood for – Noah, Nathan, Noel, Nicholas? I didn't know why I had his newt. I didn't even know whether he was merely the product of my fainting episode and an overactive imagination, no more real than the past lives we invented and reinvented every day. But I knew that the newt was his, that I'd promised him something and that in some, faraway alternate universe, he had loved me.

For now, I would make that do – and someday, I would find that boy and give back what he gave me.

And somewhere else in W.I.C.K.E.D's cavernous room, further away than any of us could ever imagine, let alone see, two boys carried their missing brother with his shattered leg from their Doors back to their home.

  
  



	22. Maps, Murder And Something Like A Memory

**Chapter 22 – Maps, Murder And Something Like A Memory**

"I don't understand."

The dark-haired boy with olive skin and a questioning expression followed me into the Weapons Store, clambering over a series of spears in the doorway. His eyes were out on stalks as he looked around the bunker under the ground floor of the Homestead and the myriad of weapons strapped to the walls and littering the floor. Up on the far wall were at least fifteen bows of different strengths and sizes, sheaths of arrows hanging at their sides. The long wall to the left housed almost any type of knife you can think of, from the ones that Edie used up at the Barn to short, serrated daggers that you could strap onto your waistband, to long, thin blades that could almost be 18th century fencing swords. There were the remains of various animal traps that we'd tried to set in the Maze for the first few months, jumbles of net, rope and bits of jagged metal – there were even rows of darts in a box by the doorway. Judging by the look on the boy's face and the way his eyes flicked nervously towards the staircase, he was clearly concerned that any one or a combination of these weapons was about to be used on him – and frankly, with everything that had happened in the Glade over the past week, if it had been anyone other than me down there with him, he might have been right.

"What do you mean, Aris? Say what you're thinking, I can't deal with anything else today."

After a week of feeding a comatose Aris soup through a straw and dripping water into his mouth with a kitchen pipette while Rachel watched him like a hawk for hours on Sonya and Harriet's orders, a week of writing down every passing thought she had about him and everything he muttered in his sleep that I could translate ('Teresa', 'everything is going to change', 'maps', but mostly 'Rachel'), Aris finally woke up yesterday afternoon, flying bolt upright in bed like a modern-day Dracula and almost giving Iona a heart attack. It had not been a good day for him to wake up, if I'm being honest – the day before, we had woken up to a colourless sky, eerily bright and artificially grey, like someone had turned off the sun. And then everything with Beth and Rachel had gone down before the Meeting of the Captains, followed by the supplies not coming up in the cage this morning. If Aris still wanted to play innocent after his creepy note and all that, Wednesday might have been a better day to wake up.

"Okay. Sorry. First of all, why do you have all this stuff down here? Rachel said you're all basically farmers? And where do you get it all from?" He plucked a dart from the box near the door and examined it. "I mean, there's no way you could make these here… and why are you helping me? If you all want my head on a stick so much."

He raised his eyebrows at me, not without some accusation and I couldn't help the smile that tugged at the corners of my lips as I bent down and pulled out one of the boxes of knives, swapping the ones in the bag at my side for slightly larger ones, recently sharpened.

"We are. Basically farmers. Only the Trackers use this room now, and only four of us have keys – it would be a lot harder for the Bobbies to keep control around here if every moody stick could go running around with a machete." My mind flew back to Beth the night before, to Amy just a few weeks ago. "When we got here, more of us tried going out at first – fighting the Grievers from a distance – and we asked for bigger and nastier weapons every time the Cage went down. But it never mattered – whatever you've got, they've got something worse, and probably with poison on it. We learned that the hard way and now we just try to avoid them – they've never passed the Doors."

Aris nodded, a frown creasing his forehead as he perched on the edge of a wooden crate and I felt a pang of sympathy for him. I wouldn't usually slam a new Baby with this much honesty and chilling information this early on, but time seemed to be something we were running out of.

"As for where it comes from, your guess is as good as mine. Wherever the supplies come from, whoever trapped us here probably. We write requests, send them down with the supply boxes and sometimes we get stuff, sometimes we don't. The only weapon they won't let us have is a gun – don't know whether they're more worried about us or their precious blubbery monsters. And your last question…"

I snapped the box closed and picked up the bag of knives to distribute in the Trackers' Room, making my way towards the door. As we stopped at the top of the staircase, I rested my hand on the younger boy's shoulder, trying to think of the right words. "If it makes it any less confusing, I'm not helping you, I'm training you so we can use you. But whether you're against us or not-"

"I'm not!" Pure frustration was written across his face, like this was the thousandth time he'd said it without any effect at all. "How can I be against you guys if I don't even remember who I am?"

"Well, we've only got your word for it – and all your muttering about 'triggering the End' doesn't exactly paint you as a sticking saint – but I'm not saying you are, Aris. Frankly, there are seasoned Gladers I'm more worried about than you right now. But whether you're against us or not, I think you can help us, in one way or another. And we're probably not going to get that out of you by pounding you into the ground and using your skin as a blanket. Your head's not going anywhere - at least not right now."

I smiled at him, trying to offset some of his fear and started making my way out to the clearing behind the Homestead, where a few of the weighted sand bags that Beth had used for training the Scaffolders were still lying around. "Come on! Let's get you trained up, buster."

Training – combat training, I mean – was something we did with all the Gladers. Although only the Trackers ever went out into the Maze, in close proximity with the Grievers and whatever else the Creators might throw at us, most of the groups (the Scaffolders, the Gardeners, the Handlers and the Bobbies) had to be strong to do their jobs properly, but even aside from that, one thing we'd accepted early on in the Maze was that nothing was certain. Grievers had never come past the inner Walls during the day, but that didn't mean that they couldn't, just that they hadn't yet. We'd heard them climbing the Walls at night, churning the ivy and stone into airborne gravel – what would happen if they kept climbing and came over? If we had any chance of survival, we all needed to know how to fight. So, we'd started a training programme: when every new Baby arrived, they'd be trained in basics by Sonya, Harriet or me and after that, it was the job of the Captains to make sure their groups were on top form – and this was something that, even with Aris, the potential traitor, we couldn't afford to let slide, now that the whole Glade seemed to be going to hell.

I was about a half a head shorter than Aris, and he was at least fifteen pounds heavier, so he looked irritatingly unconcerned when I positioned myself about a metre in front of him in the clearing. The goal of this exercise was to immobilise your opponent, by any physical means – no weapons allowed.

"Okay. I-I think I've done that before." Aris didn't seem entirely comfortable with lunging at a 5'4 girl, but his shoulders were still relaxed, his stance wide, like he didn't really believe that I could pose any threat. That posture was a mistake. A couple of sweeping kicks to the back of his knees and I had him on the ground, one arm around his neck and my knees pinning his legs within about half a minute. For a couple of seconds, the younger boy didn't say anything at all, just lay there, winded and breathing heavily – I rolled off his legs and extended a hand, pulling him out of the dust.

"But – you said you were a Medic?" His eyes were almost as wide as they had been in the Weapons Store and his cheeks were gradually reddening. I laughed, before cutting it off, trying to maintain the instructor façade.

"You said you knew what you were doing - only one of us was wrong. Now, don't worry – two years in, I've done that more times that you've said your own name. You'll get it. Come on, try again and think about what you're doing."

This time Aris stood in a more defensive position, his knees bent and his arms outstretched, palms up. Better, but too defensive – he didn't land a hit until I'd pulled him onto the floor with a roll, a few seconds before I planted my knee on his chest. An hour, a lot of cursing and multiple bruises later, the boy finally managed to knock me over, jerking my head back with my ponytail and rolling to the dust, scrabbling to pin me down before I got up. His hold was still weak and I arched my back and slipped out from under his arm, but gave him a nod and a small smile as he got to his feet.

He rubbed the back of his head, and nervously returned the smile. "Was that cheating? With your hair?"

I laughed shortly. "No. Doesn't mean I liked it, but nothing that keeps you alive is cheating – the Creators've never seemed to care about a fair fight. It was your hold that was let you down, that's all. Aim for the joints and the neck and really put your weight into it."

"Er – okay."

I clapped Aris on the shoulder and handed him flask of water. "Give it a while and you'll give as good as you get, kid."

A Few Days Later – The Map Room.

The electric strip lights of the Map Room were flickering, casting a strange fluctuating light over Rachel's face as she sat atop the sea of maps that she'd been studying, worry clouding her features while Harriet, Sonya, Charlie, Aris, Karly and I sifted through the endless piles of identical sketches.

"You haven't found her? But there's nowhere to go… could anyone be hiding her? Or do you think she went outside the Doors?"

Harriet, Sonya, and I had spent the day searching the Glade for any sign of Beth, the Captain of the Scaffolders. She had been a good friend of mine, and a sound Captain for the last two years, but something strange had happened a few weeks before that made no more sense than the machinations of the Maze. Beth had never been able to explain it either, clutching her head and whimpering like an animal caught in a trap or flat out screaming abuse if we pushed for details – I knew which was more unnerving – but as far as we could tell, Beth had been assessing the southern extension of the Homestead just before the sky had turned off, and had heard something from outside the Walls. For some reason we hadn't been able to extract, she'd gone out of the South Door to investigate – probably 'cause it was a few hours before Closing Time and it wouldn't have been the first time a Tracker had returned early and injured – but had met something far worse. Karly had found Beth unconscious and bleeding from a wound to the head on her way back from Section Five and dragged her back to the Homestead where we kept the Serum – the antidote to Griever stings.

At first, she'd reacted just like everyone else on the Serum had – a grotesque transformation period where the immune system and the poison and the antidote fought for dominance, a period of corded veins, green skin and animal screams, followed by a retreat into an unsettled quiet, frustrated into silence by the flashes of returned memory that couldn't be strung together into an explanation. But as soon as Rachel and Aris had arrived, since the sky had turned grey and the Cage had stopped coming, Beth had changed. She'd become irritable and aggressive, snapping at anyone whose opinion wasn't hers and she particularly never missed a chance to dig at Rachel, tearing holes in her suggestions and trying to get Harriet and Sonya to put her in with the Cleaners, 'before she does something awful', but she could never explain why with anything other than: 'I saw her, I saw her!'.

The day before, we'd had a meeting with the Captains to discuss what could only be described as a glitch in the Maze. Two Trackers, Raven and Joni had got to the Cliff as usual, where the Maze seemed to end and had stopped to have lunch there, when they'd noticed something flickering in front of them, almost like the air was shiny in one particular patch. After throwing a few stones at the shiny spot with no effect, one of the rocks suddenly disappeared. They'd thrown stone after stone at that patch of air and every time, the stones had winked out of existence, like they'd never been there at all. Where were they going? Where does it lead to? Why is it there? – and more than anything, could we use it? These were just a few of the questions that we'd been debating – Beth had suggested an avoidance technique, where we built something around it and mapped what changed then, Sonya had proposed a team positioned to experiment on the Shiny Portal, see how wide it was and how far back it went, but when Joni and Rachel had suggested extending that watch further out over the Cliff or attempting to monitor it overnight, to see what happened when the walls changed, Beth was suddenly furious, screaming at Rachel – not Joni, Rachel – that she was mad, a spy planted by the Creators and wanted us all dead, otherwise she'd 'never have the nerve to spout such total crap' and pushed her backwards when Rachel tried to argue, before storming out of the meeting into the night when Harriet and I tried to call after her. The younger girl still had a long raised scratch down the side of her face from her temple to just under her left ear as a memento.

In answer to Rachel's question, Harriet just huffed and said: "No. But wherever Beth is, we're gonna find her and toss her straight in the Prison. Gladers stick together – it ain't a difficult rule. If you've got a problem with another stick, you don't settle it with your fists. We're not animals. Besides, we can't have a Captain setting that kind of example - even if I do find her tonight, she's switching roles with Sara in the morning. Beth hasn't been right since that attack, anyway."

I nodded, passing a few more of the maps we'd been poring over to Karly and Sonya. "I can't imagine she's gone outside the Doors though. Doesn't make any sense."

Sonya snorted at that, yanking Map 507 next to Map 918 with more force that was necessary. "What does? Beth doesn't, the Cage and this weird sky doesn't, and whatever stupid stuff Aris was coming out with in the middle of the night definitely doesn't. 'Use the maps'? What do you think we've been doing for the last two sticking years?'

Aris said nothing in response, just handed me another pile of sheets without meeting my eyes, but Rachel stiffened and glared at Sonya before saying certainly: "He's not stupid. He just doesn't know any more than you do – and isn't it a bit hypocritical to hate him for not knowing anything? He isn't choosing what to remember."

"All right, sister. Nobody's having a go at your boyfriend, okay? We could do with him sleep-talking a little more about the maps or the Shiny Portal or the freaking way out of this dump though – any ideas, Sleeping Beauty?" Karly raised an eyebrow at Aris and he gave a weak answering laugh.

"Not yet - I'll sleep on it."

Harriet and Sonya had ordered us to try comparing the corridors (1-9) to each other – all of them from one week – desperately trying to find a new way that we could 'use the maps' that hadn't failed fifty times already. The work was boring, and the longer we kept going, with the eerie light from the broken sky radiating through the porthole windows and the evening sounds of the Glade clattering in under the door, the more everyone seemed to droop and the more slowly our pens and scissors went, twisting the corridor shapes around in our fingertips, trying to force them into a language we could understand. As my mind drifted, I found myself wondering vaguely what the mysterious N was doing at that second. Was he at school? He looked about that age, although maybe just a little too old. Sleeping? I didn't even know if we were on the same continent, but perhaps. Did he ever think about me like this? Hopeful and curious and imagining realities that could only be better than the one he was living? Well, whatever it is, it can't be any stranger than this.

"What're you going to do with the Portal, anyway, Lily?" Aris' voice called me back to the Map Room and the paper corridors.

"We're uncoupling some of the Trackers for Portal duty. We'll test it first, see how big it is, and then maybe try and work out how to reach it. Hopefully, we'll get enough time, but it really depends on-"

"Lily?" Charlie's voice sounded from the floor of the Map Room, where she'd been sitting with a piglet in her lap and shifting the odd maps that Sonya had given her to make her feel included in Glade affairs without causing too much damage. Harriet rolled her eyes and barked:

"Charlie, Lil's trying to have a conversation here. Wait until-"

"I know! I'm sorry..." The little girl shrunk a little, pulling her shoulders in around her piglet and her voice got even quieter. "I was just wondering – are these maps supposed to do that?"

Deciding to humour her, I jumped down from my perch on the wooden table and crouched down next to Charlie, brushing her curls out of the way so I could see what she was doing. "I don't know, honey, let me – oh my gosh."

In that second, all of the breath left my body and a strange sensation – fear, yet something suspiciously like hope, like excitement – rose up in its place. "Sticking hell. Harri, you need to see this."

In Charlie's lap were all of the maps for Day 307, all stacked on top of each other. Normally, that wouldn't mean anything – the paper we used was far too thick – but that week we'd run out and used greaseproof sheets from the kitchen, which meant we could see all the maps for that day. And in Charlie's lap, under the snuffling piglet and between the lines of the corridors and scrawled annotations of the Trackers, they had formed a clear black 'C'.

The Escape – A Week Later

It was 7 o'clock.

7 o'clock in the Glade had always been a time when everybody sat grouped around the fire pit, laughing, eating and sharing anecdotes from another day that had slipped past us without revealing anything; Captains would be sketching the next day's schedules and the air would be filled with voices and plans and the amber glow of the bonfire while animals and the noises of the Walls scraping into their next indecipherable pattern echoed through it.

But it was 8 o'clock on Day 931 and silence was strung like a weighted web around us. While every Glader had taken her place around the pit, the only flames blazed from torches clutched between white-knuckled fingers and, rather than providing warmth or reassurance, tonight's fire merely lit the edges of our knives and pitchforks and spears and arrowheads with a flickering red.

That day in the Tracker Room we had all been so excited that the room buzzed with energy and – as soon as we realised what Charlie had done – buzzed with people, rushing around with scissors and greaseproof paper, finally making sense of the Maps. Every new day had produced a new letter, and every few days a word had formed: FLOAT, CATCH, BLEED, DEATH, STIFF, PUSH followed by a week where the Walls seemed to mean nothing. But that was where the excitement had stopped. It had to mean something, but whatever it was wasn't an escape code – or if it was, it sounded like a pretty unpleasant solution and, as Harriet succinctly put it,we were 'damn well going to find a different one'. The Trackers had switched patrols so that they could monitor the Griever Glitch (as we'd taken to calling it) and we'd worked out that it was only about two and a half meters from the edge of the Maze – a few wooden poles would reach it. We'd planned an elaborate research regime over a week, switching patrols and trying to experiment on it as a potential escape route – an elaborate plan we never got to use. That was when the Doors stopped closing.

As my memory only stretched back 931 days at the time, I could say with total certainty that the night the Doors stopped closing was the worst night of my life. I wish I could say that was still true. That night, we'd forced the younger girls and those who hadn't been properly trained into the concrete Prison and the Map Room with a selection of knives and the biggest padlocks we could find, while the rest of us had crammed into the Homestead and boarded up every opening, killing the noise and killing the lights, as if that would stop the Creators killing us. A Griever ripped through a wall in the pantry like tissue paper and took Sophie. It didn't matter what we threw at it – knives, torches, spears – the pulsing monstrosity just kept going.

That was Day 930. We weren't letting it happen again. A Meeting of Captains was called the second the last Griever dissolved back into the Maze.

"We need a plan." Sonya had paced back and forth around the circle of chairs in the Homestead. "We've got to do something now."

"Well, it's alright saying that-" Sara, the new Captain of the Scaffolders. "We've needed a plan for nearly three sticking years, what the hell can we do in a day?"

Karly was twisting a strand of her long blonde hair around her finger as she thought. "We could send Trackers into the Maze for longer, send them to different areas at different times and see if anything opens up?"

Sonya seemed to consider it for a second, before a frown creased her forehead. "No. There's not enough time – if we were gonna do that, we needed to be doing it a week ago. We haven't got time to try and solve anymore of the Creators' stick puzzles. We're going to have to go with what we know." She glanced down at the depressingly blank notepad in her hand. "Which isn't much."

"Could we build something and climb the Walls, Sara?" I twisted around to face the younger girl. "We've never been able to do it because we've needed all the materials, but if we don't need the Homestead…"

Sara had frowned initially, unconvinced, but at my explanation started to nod slowly. "We could – but we'd have to use all the stakes and sheds in the Garden and probably rip the Homestead apart too. Harriet?"

Our leader was standing with her arms crossed over the big chair at the head of the Homestead table. She hadn't moved or spoken for the whole meeting and her dark eyes were blacker than I'd ever seen them. Her gaze darted out of the window to where the Doors to the Maze were permanently yawning open before it flicked back to Sara. "Actually, that might work. Yeah, the ivy stops before the top, but if we could build something big enough to latch onto the ivy and then the tops of the Walls, we could try and see where this thing ends – 'cause it's got to somewhere – and there might be a way of climbing down to the other side from there, if we take all the rope we've got."

"Great plan." Jenna's voice came from the back of the room, dripping with acidic sarcasm. "Except the part where the Grievers can climb walls too. With their spears and rotating blades."

"Then we go as soon as possible." Harriet's face was set. "We know they come out of the Glitch, and we know they do it at night. If they do climb after us eventually, then we'll be above them, we'll have the high ground and we can shoot down. We'd have a better chance like that than on the ground. We go as soon as we can – we're not spending another night in here like mice in a cage."

Murmurs broke out across the room building up into a rising cacophony as everybody started talking at once - people asking questions, people making plans, people crying out in protest, people just making noise to remind themselves that what we were doing was reality – until Rachel suddenly said, loud enough that her voice carried over the noise of the crowded room.

"That won't work." Rachel was perched on a nearby table, leaning back into Aris' shoulder and frowning, but her expression and her voice were unflinchingly certain.

"Well, what do you know?" Mariella spat, far harsher than her usual accented tones. What little patience the other Gladers had for Rachel and Aris was well and truly spent by that morning. The only reason they were there at all was because they remembered things – remembered more things than the disembodied face of a teenage boy with a crooked smile, at least. I'd been having dreams since the day I first saw N, and things came back like fragments of a thousand piece puzzle, except all of the pieces were from the middle and I didn't have any edges to guide what I was seeing: stars, fireworks, rooftops as far as the eye can see and that smile again and again. 'Promise me, Lily?'

Mariella had taken a step closer to Rachel, making Aris wrap a protective arm around her shoulders and pull her back into him. "You're over there acting all high-and-mighty, telling us nothing will work, yet I haven't heard any of your ideas!"

"I didn't say nothing with work." Rachel met Aris' eyes and he loosened his grip slightly. "I said that won't. At least on its own."

"Then what will?" Karly's tone was only fractionally warmer than Mariella's.

Rachel and Aris locked eyes again, a conversation that didn't need words before Rachel sighed and said. "I- we- that's what we've been trying to work out. But what we've guessed, from the stuff on the walls, from the dreams we've had, from the things people who've been stung were saying, from the stuff Aris was saying before he woke up, is that this is some kind of experiment. We're lab rats for something and this is all one big test – that's why they've got cameras all over the place."

Nobody said anything, just watched her, waiting. She ran her fingers through her hair and carried on.

"Ugh, what I'm saying is that we're not supposed to end the experiment just by chewing a hole through the box or squeezing through the bars of the cage – which is what you're proposing, Harriet. We've seen what these people can do. They've built monsters that can kill people, they've built a moving Maze with thirty-foot walls with an artificial sky, they're not just going to let us bust out any old way, we have to do it their way or their going to kill us at worst, and at the very best knock us out and put us back in, maybe with our memories wiped again. Don't you see?"

"She's right." I heard myself say. At least fifteen heads swivelled to me. "We've all had theories about why we're here – a prison, protection, a test, whatever – and up until a week ago, they all seemed pretty viable. But those letters from the Maze? The supplies not coming? The Doors not closing? Surely that means we're not supposed to stay here. They want us to get out – like a final test or something. So yeah, I see, Rachel – but what are you proposing? What else can we do?"

A look of relief skittered across the younger girl's face at the proof that some of us were hearing her without jumping down her throat, and she clambered down from the table, making her way into the centre of the circle of Captains. "Right. Am I okay to keep going, Harriet? Sonya?"

Harriet nodded. "If you've got an idea, kid, it's one more than we've got. But make it quick."

Rachel took a deep breath that didn't do anything to reassure me about what she was going to say. "Yes, we've got an idea. But none of you are going to like it. The only link they've given us to the outside world is the Glitch. We know that the Grievers have to be coming from the Creators and that is their entrance."

She stopped and looked around at the expectant and sceptical faces around the room. This wasn't anything we didn't already know. Aris broke in, jumping down off the table to and standing next to her.

"Look, you guys know as well as we do that there's something important about the Glitch. That's why we spent so long investigating it, why we came up with a massive freaking plan to carry on investigating it. So, yeah, it's the Grievers' entrance. But what if it isn't a Glitch - what if it's also our exit?"

The room erupted, people shouting over each other and over Aris, crying out at the ridiculous, terrifyingly suicidal-seeming elements of that idea:

"They would say that, they sticking 'triggered the ending'!"

"Yeah, who else would volunteer to get us killed?"

"Traitors!"

"Might as well just go and hug a Griever for all the use of that!"

"Honey, you're talking straight out of your backside."

Until Sonya stood on her chair and screamed:

"QUIET! We told them we'd hear them out. Let the kid finish."

The noise died down to a discontented rumble and Rachel picked up the baton. "Lily's idea was good – going up onto the Walls. We hadn't thought of that, and you're right, we'd have an advantage, even if we can't use it as the way out – and we'll need every advantage we've got, because they're going to come after us. But if we build those ladders, we could use them to get people across into the hole from the Walls and hopefully lure the Grievers out of there long enough for everyone to make it in. We've got to try going out through the Glitch. There isn't another way, and I can't explain how I know it, I just know."

Rachel's dark green eyes found mine in the crowd and I knew why. I had seen something and known it to be true with every fibre of my being, yet I had nothing more than words that couldn't be strung together to prove it. I nodded at her – as horrible as the idea sounded, it made the only sick kind of sense that had been possible in here. I moved over to where Harriet and Sonya were standing and looked at their faces one by one, painfully aware of the enormity of the decisions we were making.

"Harri, Sonny – what else do we have? If we planned it now, we could have a shot. But the longer we sit here arguing, the less time we've got before Grievers barge in here anyway."

Karly 's voice echoed me quietly, as if the realisation was just starting to form in her head too. "We could have a shot."

Harriet looked around the room, at the faces of the family we'd built over the last two and a half years, at the gaggle of younger Gladers waiting outside and back at the maps that were strewn over the table, the codewords written in thick black ink so nobody could forget them: 'FLOAT, CATCH, BLEED, DEATH, STIFF, PUSH'. For a long time, she said nothing. And then she simply said:

"Well, ladies, that's more than we've had before."

And now here we were. Forty-two girls (even though all of the Captains agreed to the plan, some of the Gladers decided to take their chances in the Prison overnight), Aris, a myriad of makeshift weapons and an enormous ladder, hooked into the ivy of the East Gate, that just scraped onto the top of the Wall at 7 o'clock. Those of us who hadn't spent the day on the ladder had spent it training with every weapon we'd got, and many of the girls were already peppered with scrapes and cuts. We were as ready as we would ever be to face the Creators' death machines.

"Right." It was Sonya who spoke first, cutting through the silence that had reigned since we'd started to gather by the East Gate. "Is everybody here who wants to be? Is there anybody who hasn't got a weapon?"

Silence.

"Is there anybody who hasn't got any Antidote?"

We didn't know if the Antidote even worked anymore, now the Grievers seemed to have taken to simply kidnapping people, but we'd take every chance we got.

Silence.

"Does everyone know the plan?" Forty-two girls and Aris nodded, but Sonya repeated it anyway.

"We're going to get everybody up that ladder as quickly as we can – we haven't got any time for people wimping out and vertigo, so keep your eyes forward – we're going to follow the Trackers across the walls and over to the Glitch. When we get there, those of you assigned to the ladder, get it into the hole as quickly as you can and Aris and Rachel are going to go in there with the codewords. If anything happens to them, nobody hesitate to take that place. If anything comes at you, hit it, kill it if you can. Understood?"

Forty-three nods. I felt Charlie's hand slip into mine – the one that wasn't holding a spear – and squeezed it hard, giving her the best smile I could manage and she managed a wavering twitch of her lips in return, tossing her wispy hair back out of her face. There was something hollowly disconcerting about tiny, fragile Charlie clutching a serrated knife between her delicate fingers. I swore to myself in that second that I would die before anything happened to her. We were going to get her home and put her in a place that those monsters could never touch her, with as many guinea pigs as she wanted.

Sonya seemed to have run out of things to say; trying to elaborate any more on the plan would only reveal the chasmic holes that it was virtually made up of, so she too fell silent.

Harriet stepped forward then, climbing up onto the bricks that usually made up the edges of the bonfire, the light from the flames casting flickering golden patterns across her skin. "Okay, everyone. This is it. This is what we've waited for. We've been here for 931 days of our lives, and we can never get those days back –" She gestured to the empty Glade, still an eerie grey from the artificial sky. "This place, and the people who built it have stolen them. They've stolen our memories and our families and our lives."

As Harriet spoke, you could see the group moving closer, hands locking together and determination beginning to appear in the eyes of the Gladers gathered there.

"But no more. No more will we sit here and play house for some scientists too cowardly to speak, with their notes and their code and their camera lizards. No more will we cower like frightened animals in a cage, waiting to be slaughtered one by one. That ends tonight! Tonight, the hunted will become the hunters! Who's with me?"

The cheer started slowly, as Harriet's words struck deep in the hearts of the girls and boy standing in front of her, the injustice and the anger and the cumulative strength of almost fifty people began to course through our veins, and soon it had built into a shout and then a roar that crashed over us in waves, again and again, drowning out the distant echoes of the Grievers' moans in the depths of the Maze.

Amid the roar, Harriet took off towards the East Gate and swung herself up the ivy and onto the ladder, Sonya and Raven on her heels. It took her just a few minutes to roll off onto the top of the Wall. That was all it took – an isolated figure against a pixelated sky – for the crowd to move, surging up the ivy and towards the ladder.

Tonight we would stand. Tonight we would fight. Tonight we would reclaim what was stolen. Together.

The Griever Glitch

We almost made it.

I didn't know what time it was when we clambered over the ladder onto the final stretch of wall that led to the edge of the Maze and the Glitch. It could have been minutes or it could have been hours. After a couple of minutes, the euphoria of our initial escape dissolved into the cold air of the evening and the cold feeling of fear that began to seep into everyone there as the moans of Grievers drifted towards us every few seconds rather than every few minutes. No amount of knives and torches can make a person truly feel brave. If you weren't scared, you wouldn't have them.

The Trackers started a rotation after a while; the Glitch was in Section 9, Raven and Orla's section, so as soon as we used the ladder as a bridge between the final set of walls, they moved to the front, switching with Marnie and Jules. We'd been walking in pairs (to our surprise, the walls were almost wide enough for three people) and Karly leaned across to me and whispered: "Why has nothing happened yet? We're almost there?"

"I don't know. They must have seen us."

The Creators' mechanical lizard cameras had quickly climbed the walls after us and had been skittering around our feet for the last hour or so, and every time somebody tried to boot them off, they just sprouted metal spikes and hung on. The Grievers knew we were coming. So why hadn't they moved?

Raven was leaning over the edge of the wall to check the next path when she suddenly froze, holding up a hand to keep back the people who had started to follow her. Everybody stopped talking. So far, every Tracker had just checked the space then whistled to call people on – nobody had frozen. I could see Raven's lips moving, like she was committing something to memory, before she came running back to Harriet, Sonya, Karly and I, trying to keep her footsteps silent by stepping on the outcrops of moss that had sprouted up there. In the stillness, her words carried back to all of the Gladers balanced on Wall 9.6.

"They're there."

"How many?" Harriet wasn't wasting time.

"All of them." Raven's voice wasn't entirely steady. "God, I didn't even know there were that many – there's at least fifteen, maybe even twenty."

"Are they just coming out?" I couldn't understand why the Grievers would all be concentrated in one corridor like that. Raven turned to me and shook her head.

"No – that's the thing. They're all bunched together, like mould or grapes or something. They're not moving, just…pulsing. It's like they're waiting for something."

Sonya groaned softly. "They are. The Creators know where we are. Why would they send fifteen Grievers to an empty Glade? What do we do?"

Harriet didn't sigh or waver, just answered firmly. "What we planned. We knew we wouldn't get through without a fight. Come on, girls." She turned away from the huddle then and raised her voice slightly, so everyone could make out her words.

"All right, everybody, weapons out. Lizzie, Yana, Nora and Fi, get ready with the ladder – you need to run and aim so Aris and Rachel can get to the Glitch. Protect them above everything else. If they don't get there then nobody does. When I give the signal, I want you to make as much noise as you can and try and do as much damage as possible while they're below us, once they're level we'll have no advantage. On my signal, everyone."

Charlie was suddenly at my side, her face frozen with fear and her knuckles white around the knife that she was holding back to front. "L-like this, Lily?"

"Like this, honey."

I turned the knife around and squeezed her shoulder, feeling a familiar flash of pure fury that, whatever twisted experiment this was, a child – a twelve year old child – was standing on a thirty foot wall, shaking like a leaf and clutching a sharpened weapon that she would never be able to use, and that her life depended on. At that moment, Rachel moved past us, holding tight to Aris' hand and on an impulse, I reached out and grabbed her shirt. When she turned round, her eyes questioning, I just tilted my head towards Charlie, so quickly that the little girl didn't notice, but the second we locked eyes, Rachel understood. She leant down and whispered:

"Hey Charlie – do you know the codewords?"

Charlie looked up in surprise, eyes wide. "Yes – f-float, catch, bleed, d-death, stiff, push."

"Awesome." Rachel frowned suddenly. "See, me and Aris were just saying - we aren't too sure of them, and we're kinda worried we might forget once we get in there. How about you come with us and make sure? Just in case? 'Cause I could use another girl in there."

Charlie didn't buy it for a second – she's was a smart kid, and everybody knew the codewords – but she also didn't stop to question Rachel's offer, just cried: "Yeah. Okay - girlpower!" in a voice that had only the slightest wobble, before gasping: "Oooh, sorry Aris."

Rachel laughed quietly, a strangely jarring sound amid the death throes of the fading Maze. "He doesn't mind – you've got 'fine features', huh, 'Ris?"

Aris attempted a smile in return. "Nah, I'm one of the girls tonight, Charlie. Safest place to be, right?"

Rachel took Charlie's hand and the three of them moved off towards the group with the ladder, waiting for Harriet's battle signal and as Rachel twisted her head around to look back at me, I managed to mouth 'thank you' at her through the chaos and catch her answering smile before moving off myself. My spear felt unbalanced in my hand and something like bile burned in the back of my throat as I took my place shoulder to shoulder with Karly. This was it.

"All right everyone. See you on the other side." Harriet took one final look over the ledge. "Go, go, go!"

Isn't it funny how memory works? That you can remember some things – totally irrational things – with perfect clarity and everything else, everything that was important in that second, is just a blur? The sound of the Grievers bursting to life and throwing themselves up the Maze Walls as the Trackers threw down the ladder sounded like giants grinding up boulders in a pestle and mortar, yet somehow the wet slap of their bodies simultaneously sounded like a fish out of water against the stone, or that putty you buy from science trips when you're ten.

I don't really know what happened to Aris, Rachel and Charlie after that second on the roof. I've never asked and never been told. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw them jump and then vanish, but the manic churning, whirring noise was getting louder, as the Grievers scaled the walls five times faster than I thought something the size of a small cow and assembled like a slimy tank would be able to climb, and then chaos erupted.

Throw, reload, throw, kick, shoot, toss, shoot, scream – where are the arrows, where did I drop the sheath – screaming, who's screaming? That touched it, it's bleeding – oozing, bleeding – do that again, quick, quick, it's almost at the top. Kick it, kick it, but don't get stuck. The smell was somewhere between burning oil and refuse, mixed with the earthy yet vaguely metallic scent of the Maze. They're at the top, ripping clefts in the rock to anchor themselves over, circle, form a circle, there's not enough room for a circle, there's not enough room.

I found myself back to back with Karly, out of arrows, knives drawn. Go, go, don't let it sting you – something ripped through my left shoulder sending a wave of heat through my body – drop, roll, get under it, there's no metal there, there's no metal under it. So many people are screaming. Fear and pain and screaming. Then there are those who are not screaming, my nightmare ten times over, bodies at the bottom of the walls, falling and not moving. They aren't crying, like he was. I'm almost out of my body, on some kind of adrenaline-fuelled autopilot, looking in from the outside. Fall, roll, aim for below, the weapons don't work, I can't pull it out, who is that behind me, I'm sorry, I'm sorry I can't help you – throw, kick, stab, roll, reload, dodge, throw. So much of me is burning and I'm drenched – blood, sweat, Griever skin – but you can't stop, you stop and you're dead. We all are.

Who are those people on the floor? Where's Karl? What's Charlie doing? Is that Harriet? I can't see, there's slime over my eyes – stab, cut, roll, dodge, I can't breathe anymore, it's stopped moving but there's another one, there's always another one and I can't breathe, I can't-

The Griever suddenly froze, a fierce, serrated spear aimed at my abdomen, pausing in midair like it was waiting for permission. The whirring ground to a spluttering halt, not just in front of me, but all around. The shrieks of metal and wet slapping vanished, and shuddering gasps and quiet moans took their place.

They'd done it. They had stopped. Is it over? My head was so clouded that I barely registered Karly throwing her arms around me. She was covered in blood, bleeding from a gash to the head and the stomach, but neither looked deep. For a couple of seconds, I couldn't do anything but hug her close to me as a wave of relief washed through my body quickly followed by a surge of guilt - she wasn't one of the girls lying in the dust of the Maze thirty feet below. But who was? The worst thing was that we never had time to find out.

The Trackers who were left quickly wrapped errant vines around the edge of the ladder and one by one, we clambered down it into the Glitch to the others and out of the Maze – a ladder then a slide – and I suppose the thing we forgot, in our grief-tinged euphoria, was that our supposed 'escape' was a descent from the start.

The Observatory at the Bottom of the Slide

For a few seconds after the slide, nobody took in anything. Everybody was tangled up in a web of limbs, covered in slime and blood and the oil that coated the inside of the slide and smelt like rotting animals – so we all fought to clamber away from each other, some people threw up, others just curled up in a ball and waited to be moved. But then we saw.

The room we were in – if I can even call it that – was cavernous. Every inch of the walls was covered in machinery: pipes, different coloured wires, computer screens, electrical circuits. On our left were about forty enormous white oblong shapes, like cocoons, and there were large frosted glass doors on the opposite wall. The vague outlines of people and shadows shifted across the doors as we stood there. But that wasn't what anybody was watching. We were standing in front of a large platform, made up of glass panels that looked like screens, separated into twenty or so compartments. Behind each one was a hunched figure in a black labcoat, their hands flying across their keyboards, their eyes fixed on us. The sight sent an involuntary shudder through my body as our group huddled closer together; despite what these people must have witnessed, there was no compassion in their gazes, merely fixation. They looked at us the way you might look at an interesting beetle on a car bonnet or a difficult algorithm, and though the fear welled and remained solid in my stomach, I felt a flicker of anger spark too. How dare they?

"The Creators…" Rachel breathed, barely louder than a whisper. The people behind the panels just kept typing, sometimes they spoke across the walls, nodding and comparing observations. A woman took a sip from a black flask on her desk.

"What do we do?" Mariella asked, though none of us had an answer. "What are they waiting for?"

Nothing. And the Creators just kept typing.

"What do you want?!" Sara screamed it, so suddenly that the girls nearest to her flinched and jumped back. Some of the observers looked up in mild interest, others didn't even do that. Just then, a wailing sound filled the space, echoing off the high ceiling and the circuited walls every few seconds, almost like an alarm, loud enough to drown out our confusion, but I swore I could still hear the keyboards of our audience clicking. It was then that Charlie grabbed my arm and pointed to the doors on the right.

They swung open towards us and two people entered the room. Everyone instinctively took a step back and I heard Aris' sharp intake of breath on seeing them. The figure on the right was a woman with shoulder-length brown hair and dark eyes – she was wearing black jeans and a simple button-down shirt with 'WICKED' embroidered in blue thread. Her face, like the vacant faces of the people behind the screens, was disconcertingly emotionless – there wasn't even any recognition in her eyes as she looked at the huddle of frightened, bloody teenagers in front of her. The person with her was wearing identical jeans, but a large hoodie with the hood up that covered their face. The cold fear in my stomach gave a sharp twist – and I didn't know who I was most afraid of.

"Welcome back," The woman said. "Over two years, and so few dead. Amazing."

The fear was replaced by burning anger in an instant. So few? A thousand unwanted scenes flooded my senses – Annabelle's grave behind the Homestead and all of those that had followed it, Sophie's screams the night before that will echo in my ears forever, the bodies littering the corridor of the Maze as we made our escape, the people that died for us.

"Are you insane?" Karly barked. "Sorry, what the hell would 'a lot' look like?"

The woman fixed Karly with her empty gaze. "Everything has proceeded exactly as we planned, Miss Linnaeus. This percentage of survivors merely exceeds our calculations. You may also wish to consider your language more carefully – some words mean very different things out here."

Almost as if she wanted to avoid any more questions fired from the fury she had incited, the woman reached out and pulled the hood back from the figure at her side. It was a girl with tumbling auburn curls, a clenched jaw and sunken, tearful eyes. It was Beth. It was as if all of the air had been sucked out of my lungs. I could see girls utterly motionless, others swaying back and forth, not knowing whether to run to help her or jump back. Beth.

In the end, it was me that spoke first, pushing past the frozen Scaffolders in front of me to be in her line of view. "Beth! What is it? What's-"

Her face contorted strangely, like back in the Homestead when I'd ask her where she thought she'd seen Rachel, like the Serum, but worse somehow. Her eyes were dark and she seemed to be fighting something as she swayed towards me and spat out: "No – no, don't – get back, I – I can't-"

I moved towards her, to help her, but the woman pushed me back, with a strength I hadn't realised she possessed. Her eyes were just as cold up close. She immediately turned to Beth, holding her back from us with an iron grip.

"Now, Elizabeth. You know what we discussed." For a few seconds, Beth fought her, her jaw still clenched and a vein standing out on her forehead. Then she went still and an eerie calm spread across her features.

"Well, I'm glad somebody knows something!" Sara again. "It's about time you 'discussed' this crap with us, don't you think?"

The woman's mouth finally curved into something suggesting a sneer, a first show of emotion. "I'm afraid we don't share that opinion, Miss Ohm. Don't presume what you know nothing of – and don't worry, you'll know soon enough."

She paused and glanced across at Beth, her eyebrows raised. "There is, of course, one final Variable."

What?

Beth was still wearing that eerie expression of tranquillity as she stepped towards us. Some smaller girls took a much larger step back. Her hands were shaking and, all of a sudden, the same tension from a few seconds before seemed to rip through her body, her teeth clenching and a shuddering gasp escaping from her lips.

"I- help me-I-"

Then the calm again. The room rang with silence. What's wrong with her? Everything in me wanted to go to her, but Karly's hand on my wrist kept me back. This time, the woman didn't say anything. Rachel was closest, at the front, just a few steps away from Beth. Her lips were white, pressed together, as she watched the face of the older girl and, despite everything Beth had said to her back in the Glade, Rachel took a step towards her before Aris could pull her back, her hands out, palms up, concern painted across her delicate features.

"Beth, what is it? Let me-"

She never finished that sentence. Quicker than a striking Cobra, Beth pulled a bone-handled dagger from her back pocket and buried it in Rachel's chest.

That was the second that everything stopped. Everything except the clicking of the spectators' keyboards. Just for a second. Then everything seemed to move in a frenzied blur, as if the world was making up for the time it had lost – Charlie screamed, a piercing sound that ripped through the silence like a gunshot. Rachel made a horrible wheezing, spluttering sound as she collapsed backwards into Aris' arms, blood already soaking her shirt and jeans. Aris knelt and lowered her to the cold linoleum, his eyes wide with terror.

"HELP!" He shouted at the woman, at the figures shielded behind their screens. They just looked back at us. Looked back at the dying girl, their hollow eyes not even flickering. "Somebody help her! HELP!"

I was there, on the floor on one side of Rachel's body, Iona on the other. Somewhere above us, Aris' shouts became sobs.

"Please, oh please, please help her. Help her, please. Help, why won't you help! She can't die, she can't die. Don't let her die, oh, help her, please, please."

Medics. Medics, we were Medics because it was a job that needed doing, not because we knew how, but even before I reached her, I knew we couldn't save Rachel. Nobody could. No, no, no. The knife had punctured a lung, explaining the wheezing, but it had hit other things too, things that blood was pouring out of, onto her hands desperately pushing at the wound on her chest, trying to fight off the death that was rushing towards her, onto my hands, trying – somehow, anyhow – to stem the bleeding with a shirt, onto Aris', stroking her hair and her face.

Then suddenly, Rachel relaxed. She moved her hands away from her chest and grabbed hold of Aris, pulling him towards her with all the strength she had left.

"'Ris, stop. Stop...stop now." He was crying and I felt hot tears coursing down my own cheeks, mingling with the blood on Rachel's clothes. "It's okay…I'm o-okay."

She was gasping now, choking on the blood in her throat, on her lips. "I'm sorry, 'Ris. Tell them…t-tell them… I'm sorry."

He shook his head, "No, no, please", but she coughed and twisted violently in his arms, spraying blood across his jeans and my shirt, and Aris squeezed her hand in his and whispered, "Okay…okay", in a voice that sounded like broken glass.

I swear I saw a smile cross her face as her eyes closed and her body went limp, finally surrendering her life to the thieves hovering around her.

Another second of silence and in it, I forgot how to feel.

I was as empty as those husks of people hunched over their identical keyboards, as the woman still standing watching us with emotionless eyes, as the Glade that we left behind, nothing more than a harbour for ghosts and a monument to the injustice of the world. Then a gasping noise burst from Beth, halfway between a scream and a sob, making everyone jump - I hadn't even realised she was still standing there - and, before anyone could move, she was sprinting towards the frosted doors of the electronic hall.

Aris jumped to his feet like he'd been shocked, anguish and hatred distorting his features as he threw himself forward, pulling his own knife out of his pocket. I don't think I've ever moved so fast – I gripped one arm, Karl the other, holding him back, holding him the way I did in training just a few days before, the way that meant he could hardly move.

"No!" He struggled, writhing against us, kicking, scratching at our arms until he drew blood. "No! Let me go! No!"

Aris fought and twisted until the doors of the hall crashed back together and Beth disappeared into another maze of identical corridors behind them, and then he sunk to the ground next to Rachel's body, taking her hand, all of his fight gone and nothing left to fight for. The WICKED woman said:

"All things happen for a purpose." Any of the sneering and bitterness that had been in her voice before had vanished. "You must understand-"

But the rest of whatever she said was drowned out by Aris. What started as a quiet, hollow sob, grew into a guttural scream, pure agony echoing around the walls of the hall, sweeping through everyone standing there and bringing a fresh wave of tears pouring down my cheeks. Fiona started towards him, touching his shoulder, but at the contact, the same tormented noise tore from his throat and she retreated next to Orla.

I still hear that sometimes, when I dream about that day. Even sometimes when I don't dream. I know Aris was screaming for Rachel, for himself, for the thing that they had that Beth's knife had splintered into fragments no more salvageable than dust in a breeze, but there was a part of all of us that day, on Day 931, that was screaming like that. That had been screaming since Day 1.

When one scream started to die into the shadows of the room, he screamed again, screamed until his vocal cords must have been ripped to shreds, screamed until his whole body was rocking with the force of it. He screamed until it drowned out the noise of whatever was going on outside the frosted doors until it was too late for WICKED when the enormous double doors crashed open. The woman spun towards them, all the blood drained from her face, her mouth open and at least fifteen men and women in ragged, dirt-stained clothes burst in carrying rusted guns, pistols, rifles that looked ancient next to the WICKED tech coating the hall, shouting to each other over Aris' and now the WICKED woman's screams. Two men tackled the woman to the floor and, without hesitation, shot her in the head. Other intruders shot at the glass screens protecting the onlookers behind the computers, shattering them, one by one and sending the workers running back into the depths of the building – the lucky ones who didn't just fall.

None of us, except Aris - whose screams still managed to reach me through the chaos – made a sound. We were beyond fear now.

A man, wearing a filthy red jacket and carrying a pistol ran towards us, his weapon down. His eyes were bright, kind even, but his whole body looked tired – drooped somehow, like he spent every day fighting to survive until the one that followed. I could empathise with that.

"We don't have time to explain." His free hand was stretched out towards us, beckoning now. "Just follow me and run like your life depends on it. Because it does."

Nobody questioned him – at that moment, anything that wasn't W.I.C.K.E.D sounded good – and we sprinted through the crossfire, through the screams of agony and terror, out of the chamber, down a long corridor with coral wallpaper into a dingy tunnel, left up a twisting flight of stairs, right down another corridor, identical to the last, up three more flights of stairs, more corridors that all seemed to blend into each other, another set of frosted glass doors and finally, we stumbled outside, but even then we didn't stop running. Charlie was between me and Sonya, both of us watching her carefully to make sure she didn't fall, and we sprinted after the man who'd spoken until we reached a battered carcass of a bus. There were spiderwebs of rust tinging the metal at every joint and almost every window had long cracks running across, but we climbed on without a word as our rescuers screamed "Hurry!", "Get on!", "Now, go, go!", "Sit down, quickly now!"

I had just clambered into a seat next to Karly, Charlie next to Sonya in front of us, when a sudden boom shook the bus. A man outside the bus – early forties, perhaps - was pounding on the doors, trying to get them open from the outside, but his movements were unlike anything I'd ever seen. Jerky, almost frenzied and I realised with a wave of nausea, when he pulled back, that it was his head that had rocked the bus seconds before. There was a huge red gash across his forehead from the metal of the doors, but that was barely distinguishable from the weeping sores and gashes that already covered every visible inch of his skin, and what hair that was left on his head was hanging in matted filthy rats' tails that stuck to the side of his head. He was staggering backwards and forwards by the doors, banging and chanting:

"Save them, save them, save them from the Flare! Nobody saved us…nobody saved us-" His bitter chant disappeared into a wet cough. "You can run, children, run, run run, but nobody gets to hide. No fun, no fun, no fun. It doesn't play fair, no, no, no-"

What? The Flare? He broke off into a manic laugh that would have frozen stone and a woman next to Mariella with long blonde hair swore and balanced her rusted pistol on the lip of a shattered window.

"Damn, damn, damn." She fired once and the man fell like a stone to the mud below. "If he's here, they'll all be here. James, step on it!"

The Gladers at the back hadn't even had time to sit down when the man with the red jacket floored the accelerator.

We were out. But where?

An Hour Later – The Bus

It was raining now. It's funny that I couldn't even remember what rain looked like – it never rained in the Glade. I could picture it, knew what it was but I couldn't remember. Some of the rain hit the windows and I followed the drops down the glass, chasing each other, sometimes merging, sometimes splitting apart. Some drops flew in through the bullet holes in the glass and spattered onto whoever was sitting behind them.

Most of the girls were sleeping – Charlie, Elle, Dina, Sara, Jules, Orla – and one of the men had somehow carried Aris from the underground chamber and placed him in the seat next to me. His hysteria eventually quietened into muffled sobs and then into silence as he too fell asleep, his head resting in my lap. I just held him, stroking his dark brown hair softly, like you would with a child until he slept. The divisions of the Glade, the ostracising of Aris and Rachel, the fight with Beth, it all seemed so trivial now, so stupid in this whirl of shattering realities and meaningless death. So I held him because what else was there?

We passed through towns and villages, but nothing was moving. Most of the houses had no windows and there was a thick layer of dust covering everything we passed – cars, houses, but no people. There wasn't a single sign of life; there were barely any plants, even. After about the fifth of these ghost towns, one of the rescuers – a man, fairly young, but with the same dogged look in his eyes that red-jacketed James had – made his way to the back of the bus and swung himself into the empty seat in front of us.

"Are you guys alright?" His voice was gentle, concerned, which was a nice change. I started to nod, but then realised how ridiculous that response would be, considering the hand that I was brushing back Aris' hair with was still stained by rivulets of blood. I shuddered instead, bile rising into the back of my mouth and Karly made a disapproving 'humpf' sound. The man just nodded himself, his mouth a set line.

"Sorry. That was a stupid question. Who is 'alright', anyway?"

"What happened here?" Karly hadn't spoken for the whole time we'd been on the bus. Neither had I. It hadn't seemed like there was anything much to say. Now her voice was harsh, challenging the man to refuse her question. He didn't answer straight away, looking out of the window at the shell of a supermarket, where a single shopping cart was rolling across the abandoned parking lot, buffeted by the wind and rain.

"That's a very long story, I'm afraid."

We just stared at him. He sighed, a long, drawn-out whistle.

"I keep forgetting that you kids don't remember all this stuff. There ain't nobody in the world 'cept you guys that don't know what happened here. What happened everywhere. We don't know what they did to your heads in there – we're not scientists – so, I don't know if we'll be able to get your memories back. But either way, I guess it all started with the Sun Flares.

The Flares happen all the time, and they used to be monitored by various organisations, mostly in the US – they'd never posed a threat before – but a few years ago, they just kept rising and rising and we only had a couple of minutes once the scientists realised what was about to happen before they slammed into the Earth. All of our satellites disintegrated, millions died instantly, tens of millions after days, and enormous stretches of earth became uninhabited wasteland."

The man's expression was dark and I could only imagine the scenes that were playing out behind his eyes. For the first time, I was at least a little relieved that I couldn't remember. That sounded horrific, but it still didn't explain what had happened to us. What had happened to the man outside the bus.

"Then, there was the sickness. Apparently, it came out of somewhere in South America, but with the whole ecosystem falling apart, it was impossible to contain it there – the insects spread everywhere looking for new habitats and the disease spread with them. People call it the Flare. It's an awful, awful disease – I'd rather shoot myself than get it. There's no cure and only the richest people can afford the only treatment, and even that ain't any use."

Karly broke in. "Is that what that man…" Her voice trailed off, probably replaying the slamming of his head against the glass, the weeping sores.

The rescuer nodded gravely. "Yes. He looked like he'd had it for a while."

"What does it do?" I couldn't help myself, even though I wasn't sure I wanted to know. "Do people…rot or something?"

The man frowned, like he didn't particularly want to dwell on it long enough to explain. "No – most of the physical stuff they do to themselves, or the universe does. It's a mental illness, mostly, a wickedly progressive one- it almost lives in the brain. It starts with delusions, increased aggression – people often don't notice they've got it at first – but soon it shuts down everything that makes people human. Reduces them to animal instincts, where they barely know what they're doing... 'S more than not recognising the people they love – they'll go for 'em, rip their throats out if they can manage it."

I noticed with horror that the man's eyes were shining with tears. "And there's nothing people can do?"

He sighed again, even longer than the last one.

"It's airborne, so people stay inside. Sanitation, safe zones, containment and walled cities. Nothing stops it, just slows it down. That's why WICKED had you kids – they want a cure. You're some of the millions orphaned, they tested hundreds and chose you guys for the final test. Ain't ya' lucky? Everything you lived through was drawn up by scientists, planned to produce certain emotions –they studied your brain waves, your reaction times, your minds – all trying to find anything that could lead to a cure. But no. At the moment there's nothing."

Then something strange happened. The rescuer frowned again – started to speak and stopped, as if something had suddenly occurred to him. He looked across at me – and not at Karly, at me, studying my face. I could tell you the exact shade of blue of his eyes. His eyes fell on the small carved lizard at my throat - I realised, with a jolt, that it was smeared with the blood that had coated my hands – and he seemed to angle his body towards me, his expression strangely intense.

"At least, not up here. See, WICKED are obsessed with brain patterns – brain waves, neurone activity – but there are some scientists, on the inside of the organisation and outside it that don't believe that's the answer. There's a rumour spreading that some scientists inside WICKED are working on a project based on a new plant that's been extracted from the Andes – they're calling it Project Electricity. Are you listening to me, Lily?"

"Yes." Why wouldn't I be listening?

"They're calling it Project Electricity. We can't be sure exactly what's going on or what they're doing with it – it's being spearheaded by a major scientist and mechanoengineer on the inside, who's using WICKED's resources to examine the cure. We've been trying to get money to him, to work out who he is. Apparently, there's some chemical from what's left of the jungle in the Andes that seems to have an effect on the Flare, something about the cell membranes. If WICKED's experiment fails – which it almost certainly will – we'll be banking on him. It's got a lot of potential, but it needs to be explored, and at the moment, our guy can't get out. Do you understand what I'm saying?"

We both nod. Karly was still listening to the man on the seat in front of us, but as he was talking, I was suddenly very aware that he was talking to me, and – more than that – badly wanted me to listen. His eyes were still fixed on my face with that strange intensity until I nodded back at him. "Yes, sir."

He laughed at that. "My name's Timmy, sweetheart. None of this 'sir', nonsense. But I'm glad you got what I'm saying – you get any more questions, you come to me, okay?"

"Okay."

The man, Timmy, got up from the seat, careful not to bounce Charlie and Sonya, who were fast asleep against each other.

"Anyway, that's enough story-telling for one night. It'll be a while before we get where we're going, so you better get some rest, Birdie."

Timmy smiled at me – the first smile I could remember seeing for a while - patted my shoulder gently and moved back towards the front of the bus. Half of me wanted to immediately go over what I'd heard with Karly, to try and make something make sense, but she'd already leaned against the window pillar and closed her eyes.

Birdie. Now, why did that seem familiar? It seemed too strange for a term of endearment. That word flickered in my brain in the same way that the N on the back of my lizard did. I wanted to think about it more, to try to catch the loose thread that was unravelling in my mind, but the trauma and exhaustion and the enormity of the day finally caught up with me and I fell asleep instead.

It wasn't until a long time afterwards that I realised I had never told Timmy my name.


	23. Cameras, Candidates and Unusual Chemicals

**Chapter 23 – Cameras, Candidates and Unusual Chemicals**

**UNKNOWN P.O.V**

It's 2am and the Observatory is almost deserted. How typical of W.I.C.K.E.D employees. When those children were hustled out, screaming over the broken bodies of other children, gunfire raging over their heads, my heart left my body. The Observatory was crammed, wall to wall - you could hardly move for spectators whispering and some sick bastards passing bets. I can only be thankful they were two monitors down from me or I'd be on probation tonight rather than here. Guarding them. If you can call it that.

There's no real movement on any of the child monitors and, out of habit, my eyes drift to the right one. Thirty two girls curled up on bunks, wrapped in clean sheets and dressed in white fleece pyjamas that might as well be prison garb. All are asleep, some of them breathing deeply, cocooned in this despicable feeling of safety that we've fabricated. Others are stirring, the trauma and adrenaline of the day before seeping into their dreams and whispering around them, murmuring and uneasy, almost as if they can sense our people in the next room, barring the windows and setting the ropes and make up on the volunteer victims, building the next House of Horrors for these kids to survive. I should know – I helped design almost all of it.

A sick feeling wells in my stomach, like bile roiling back and forth, and I have to swivel the monitor for a few seconds to find her. Even after five years, I can never be entirely certain whether this room is a godsend or a torture.

She's lying in a bed in the far corner, her dark waves falling out of her hair tie and spilling out onto the pillow. She forgot to plait it and it'll be fuzzy in the morning. My mind flashes to a Barbie Fashion Head that I bought a lifetime ago while my wife laughed at me, sitting on the living room and French plaiting the thing while a curly-haired baby shrieked and bounced in a rocker, barely enough hair on her head to scrape into a tiny ribbon. I was always so prepared, so proud. It all seems worthless now.

She's pressed all the way back against the wall behind her, her arms wrapped around the smaller girl - Charlie - her body curving around her, shielding her, comforting her and every time Charlie shifts even slightly, Linnet - Lily. They'll penalty me for that. Every time Charlie shifts, snuffling quietly, Lily pulls her closer, drifting in and out of sleep and stroking her hair. The ache of pride in my chest is almost a physical weight, pulling me down into the chair, but doesn't disperse the feeling that has festered and grown there for half a decade. The feeling of being cheated, stolen from. Because I used to hold her like that.

There's only so long I can look at her - the crisscross of gashes across her arms, the slight from creasing her forehead, even in her sleep. So I turn to the left monitor and Group A. There aren't as many of them - their attack procedure during the escape was never as ordered as Group B's. They stayed longer in the Maze so were down three anyway and hadn't engineered the height advantage that Group B had, so they'd lost about 10 more people. It seems criminal that after just five years and a natural disaster, I can think about the murder of ten teenagers as clinically as that.

  
  


I remember that argument with Chancellor Michael when the Maze Trial plans were released, the day the boy George was killed by the Serum. The day I realised what a sickening trap I'd locked myself into. Asking him, shouting, begging, why did they have to die? We had the technology - I myself had pioneered the technology - that would allow an equally realistic simulation, or at the very least, a machine that would stun or knock eliminated Candidates out for twenty-four hour periods, producing the same reaction in the remaining Candidates, but one that would allow us to rescue those left behind. Even on the coldest level, we couldn't afford to squander Immunes like that. Why did we need senseless murder? Hadn't there been enough loss? Yet they won't even negotiate, punishing me instead. They refuse to use the term 'murder'.'Incident', or sometimes 'tragic incident' if it looks like something will reflect particularly poorly on the Big Men at the top, are the only way such events are ever alluded to.

I lean forward to swivel the camera around the boys' room, checking their heart rates, their neurological activity and a hard edge digs into my chest. I reach up and readjust the identification tag - a false name for the act I'm about to put on and the four black stars that show the respect I've won for 'furthering the cause'. They make me sick. See, WICKED have a way of making people feel like this system is mutually beneficial. You help us and we'll help you. But WICKED never give a damn thing. They take and take and don't care who they take from, until the human beings they're bleeding dry are nothing more than empty husks and then they manipulate others into taking their place.

  
  


As I move the edge of the tag away from my chest, I catch sight of the long raised scars along my right wrist and forearm and glance back towards the screen, almost involuntarily. She used to call them my 'spiderwebs' and she'd trace them with her tiny fingers. Sometimes she'd fill them in with biro and draw tiny arachnids in between, giving them all names and adventures. The scar came from an accident in the lab ten years ago - it hardly mattered, I'd gathered the data, but the machine malfunctioned and the materials I was manipulating were less than human-friendly. Before the Sun Flares hit, my research had made me one of the most respected mechanoengineers in the world. So naturally, when that world burst into flames, abandoned by nature itself, my door was one of the first they kicked down.

I wasn't going to work for them. Like every self-respecting scientist, I'd heard the murmurs about the people at the top - John Michael, Ava Paige - whispers of corruption, desperation and people already funding the development of the Bliss for wealthier blind optimists and I swore I'd never do it. When they arrived with their black suitcases and complex contracts, I never felt threatened. I worked for myself, I'd never cared about money - they couldn't buy my loyalty or my skill. At least not with dollars. But they knew that and so they bought me another way. With a contract far more binding than any seven-figure pay checks. The Flare was every parent's worst nightmare - you can protect your child from thunderstorms, the head lice in the reception class and the monsters under the bed but what can you do when the world burns, against a virus mutating beyond recognition, when the monsters wear the faces of the people you know? You're powerless. And they promised they'd protect my girl.

  
  


So I helped them. I sold my soul to the devil. It became me that they whispered about and sneered at, people I considered friends swearing they'd rather die than do what I did. But how can they know? You cannot. Until you are a parent, holding a life in your arms and imagining it being torn away and dashed out, you cannot know what you'd do to prevent that. That is what I would die for.

And they protected her. They took her to a place where the Flare and its offspring could never touch her - protected her by imprisoning her in their own damn experiment. And I couldn't say a goddamn thing, because they had her. Even now, when my blood boils every time I look at the faces of those children, trying so hard to be adults where most adults would crumble, I can't say a goddamn thing. The acidic metal in the tunnels they will enter in less than three days will have to hit at least two of the kids for the Variables to play out. They're supposed to choose non-Immunes but they've got enough left and she's just as dispensable. So I can't say a goddamn thing.

A sudden boom echoes from the left monitor - Simon's swing with one of the ceiling ropes adjacent to where the boys are sleeping has sent a toolbox clattering to the floor. It's quickly followed by a crackle across the intercom:

"Phase Two to Observatory, Phase Two to Observatory - are the Candidates still in position, C5?"

"Loading Camera 5, in 3,2,1, Timmy." I load the requested screen. "All Candidates down, but some movement. Keep it down for a few minutes, they should relax."

"Roger that, message received."

The technology we had was ridiculously advanced – if we'd wanted to, we could have sent facial expressions, visual images across the compounds to each other – but Timmy still insists on using the codewords. And using them wrong, but he knows it makes me smile. At the angle I'm focused on, some of the kids are shifting in their beds, the sound echoing somewhere in their consciousness, but the sedatives in their food the night before seem to have keep most of them under. I rotate the lens to monitor the other boys and realise the error - all except one.

One boy at the far end of the room is sitting up. I zoom in, assess the risk. His eyes are heavy with sleep and his blond hair is sticking up in tufts, but there's no doubt he heard the noise. He stays there motionless for a second, frowning as he listens. I wait - go back to sleep. Don't touch the door. Don't make them shock you, son.

He swings his legs out of the upper bunk and, trying to not to wake the others, lowers himself onto the floor of the bedroom. Damn.

"Timmy, there's single Candidate movement. Keep it still, I'm on him."

  
  


The boy's movement has called up his ID on the manipulation screen with the words 'DISABLE' in red capitals. Just don't touch the door. Go back to sleep.

The boy stumbles between the bunk beds, sleep still clouding his vision and his coordination as he leans down to check on each sleeping face, mouthing a headcount with each one, the frown not dissipating until he gets to the last bed. He's just checking them, I realise, with a pang, he's lost people today. When A3 - Alby. Use their names, goddamnit. When Alby was killed by the Grievers during Group A's escape, it was only one of the Elites - Thomas - that held this boy back from an identical fate. How is he managing to blame himself?

When he reaches the last bed, he casts a nervous glance at the door, the source of the noise he can't be sure he heard. Don't, son. But he just rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands and sighs heavily before muttering softly

"Bloody hearing things now. Slim yourself. Nice 'n' calm."

The boy clambers back into his bed and lies down - I tune into the microphone behind the bed and wait. After a few long seconds, his breathing slows and he's under again. I check his neurone activity: it's higher than the others due to the adrenaline, but reduced enough that he should be still until the wake-up.

"Observatory to Phase Two - all clear, Timmy."

The team in the side room resume their set design and I keep the camera on the sleeping boy. The name on the screen reads 'Isaac N.' - but they've always called him Newt. She always called him Newt. I didn't expect to like this kid. Definitely didn't expect to be impressed by him. But he was strong long before the Sun Flares, strong in a way that no kid should have to be even before he ended up in this prison. And yet, he still managed to care. To care enough to fight off tranquillisers that would floor a horse to check on them. To love her. Which was something we had in common.

When he mutilated his leg three months ago, I spent hours manipulating a formula to send up something in their supplies that could reconnect the ligaments and tendons, knit the bones in record time. I'd wished I could help reconnect his mind, in the way that she always knew how to do, but he seemed to do it himself, ceding the Runner Keepership to his friend and operating as the oil that kept the cogs of the Glade turning. And somehow I'm proud of him. Like I'm proud - proud and furious - for every one of them.

Looking at Newt, as he turns over in his sleep - once, twice, three times, mouthing something that I can't read - I feel a wave of crippling sorrow, followed by a familiar rush of fury. I've told them again and again, told them until my food is docked, my pay frozen and my Lab suspended for as long as they can afford - the Immune Killzone patterns are useless, the Trials are useless. These 'patterns' are produced solely in Immunes, how can they be applied to those who are not? The patterns we received from preliminary tests show that the blueprints these kids are producing are so different that they can't be compared - the emotion doesn't matter, the intelligence of the child doesn't matter. Clearly, something is affecting the Killzone patterns, but the answer to what that is doesn't lie there - the patterns are merely a side-effect of some deeper damage or protection, no more use than studying the wing patterns on a butterfly for a cure. The Immune patterns are of no use now, maybe not ever, unless we can produce a deeper kind of imaging, something that can sequence millions of cells and DNA structures, and that would require far more time and funding than W.I.C.K.E.D are diverting.

  
  


The bastards know they're wrong. They know it's useless. But they're too far in now to back it up – they don't dare. Cowardly bastards.

They won't give me time. This new plant from the Andes could have significant uses against the Flare, I'm sure of it, even in preliminary testing. The effect it has on brain structures and cell membranes is enormous - groundbreaking, in fact - there has to be some way of manipulating it, but they won't give me time or money, because it doesn't involve 'the patterns'. I've done what testing I can on my own under a codename, Project Electricity, and I've even managed to rope in some old contacts of mine to work on it through coded letters and messengers, building the scaffolding of the programme right under WICKED's nose – I'm certain this has potential. I just need time. But I can't leave this place because they have her.

All I can do is watch as Phase Two begins - as I take just another role in their farce, sending Newt and countless others into a place that will almost certainly kill them, and kill them in the worst way possible.

'I love you. And I'll find you, Newt. The second that I can, I swear I'll find you.'

'Good that.'

My God, I'm sorry, Birdie, I think. I altered the chemicals in all the non-Immunes' food doses and their tattoo injections to contain elements of concentrated Bliss and anti-drowsiness drugs to counteract its numbing effect. That should protect them for a couple of days, long enough for them to get past the city, and hopefully past the worst infection risk.

"Sir."

There's a cough in the doorway. Ava Paige stands there, her face emotionless - an Ice Queen, the only way to survive in here. "It's time. We need you in five, in the Detox Chamber."

She doesn't even give me time to respond beyond the dutiful nod that I'm forced to offer, exchanging my frown for a compulsory mask of compliancy. She nods in return and coolly responds:

"Thank you for your cooperation, Doctor."

Fifty faces flicker across the wall-length monitors and I pity them. I hope for them, feel guilty for what I'm about to subject them to in the name of science. They're incredible kids - kids we need on our side. Maybe they can make it. Come on. They need to listen, pay attention to their instructions, pay attention to each other. I've never been so proud or so frightened of anything before - something that seems to intensify every day. When you think you've reached the limit of any human feeling possible, this place, this disease pushes you past it.

I force myself away from the monitors and follow Paige to the Detox Room, rehearsing my role, but as I walk down the identical corridors, I'm seeing that boy's face and I'm thinking about his mother. I'm thinking about what those brown eyes that had been so concerned bending over the other boys just now would look like filled with feral lunacy. No. That's not fair. In this second, I know I'll do everything in my power, I won't let them die - won't let him die, because they're living for each other, whether they know it or not and jealousy doesn't come into it anymore. That died with the millions in the Sun Flares.

I'll try, Nettie, baby. I'll try. But it might be an inevitable.

  
  



	24. Weapons, Wristbands and Immaculate Weasels

**Chapter 24 – Weapons, Wristbands and Immaculate Weasels**

**LILY'S P.O.V**

I can't see.

That's not quite true. I can. Everything around me is black, but it's shifting. The blackness is swirling in torrents and spirals, whirlpooling, locking me into wherever I am. There's something wet running down the side of my face and my back. Blood, slime, sweat, I don't know, but it's cold and I can feel my body shuddering in the darkness. The dark is full of noises, echoing in nothing – whistling, like air through a slightly open window or a car rushing by on a freeway. And there are voices too, whipping past me so quickly I barely catch them before they dissolve.

"Come on, Birdie!"

"I love you, Lilybird…you know that?"

"Nettie, baby, don't you ever let anyone tell you what you want – you find something you want and you fight for it."

"Are you listening to me, Lily? Project Electricity."

Voices - all of them familiar, yet all of them strangers, the faces of the speakers blurring just outside of my vision.

Then suddenly, there's colour and light and I'm hanging onto a wall by my fingertips, thirty feet off the ground. I look down and the floor is coated in terracotta dust – there are bodies, motionless, dust covering their clothes. I can't be there. I need to go up. My fingers are wrapped around protruding handholds, brightly-coloured plastic that clash with the ivy of the Glade Walls that I'm clinging to. The air is filled with screams and the sound of metal against metal.

"Lily!"

Charlie. I can hear her screams above me, ricocheting off the surrounding stone, her voice void of anything but pure terror.

"Lily, help!"

"Charlie! I'm coming! I'm coming!"

I need to go up. There's a green plastic handhold above my head – if I could just reach that, I could get to the top, I could be safe. I stretch up – "You can do it, Birdie!" - no, go away, I don't know who you are. You're wrong anyway – my fingertips only just brush the edges of the handhold, even if I stretch until my shoulder burns, until I'm a few degrees away from falling. No, no, no. As I hang there, an ominous click sounds from the depths of the Wall itself. I stretch again, but it's no use and I'm slipping anyway and – oh, sticking hell. The protruding footholds are gradually sliding back into the wall, I can't have much more than seconds, but I can't reach.

"That one. The orange one – quick, now."

It's him. N. He's lying on his stomach at the top of the wall, his hair falling into his eyes as he gesticulates wildly at another foothold about a metre away from me. He smiles, but his eyes are worried. The purple plastic under my feet is getting smaller every second.

"Come on, Lil! Hurry!"

It's too far. I know it, but what choice do I have? I lean back and throw myself towards the orange bar but my feet catch in the ivy and I slip. Liquid fear bolts through my veins and I know that I'm going to fall, I'm going to fall into the dust, be no more than the bodies in the sand, I'm going to-

There's a hand on my wrist, then my waist, someone pulling me up, pulling me into them.

"I got ya', Princess."

Yet another name that I don't recognise. But it's him, it's him. My arms are around his neck and his are twined around my waist, his head on top of mine. We're both trembling but I can't hear the noises anymore. He is warm and we're safe. A thick leather strap with a button clasp is wrapped around my wrist – the leather looks worn, but the letters "L-I-L-Y" are carved into it and filled in with black paint, and that strange alien familiarity echoes through me at the sight. There's something digging into my chest and I pull back. The tiny carved lizard is hanging on a leather strap around his neck. I knew it was yours.

I reach up and gently tilt his face back down to mine. "Who are you, N?"

Surprise crosses his face and he squeezes my hands in his. "What? Bit early for philosophy, huh, Lilybird?"

"But who are you? If your life depended on it?"

N frowns for a second, his eyes almost russet rather than the earthy brown they had been, but then he laughs – that smile that I've seen a hundred times – and lightly touches the lizard pendant resting against his collarbone.

"But don't ya' see, Lilby? I've already told you."

And everything dissolves.

The Dormitory

My watch read 5:44 and the dormitory was silent. It took me a few minutes to calm my breathing – the flashes of the bodies on the Maze floor, the Wall, the voices that had whipped through my head in the dark and him. N. What can you have possibly told me?

The dormitory was surprisingly clean, if slightly cold. Charlie was snuggled into my chest still, curled into a ball, her wispy hair falling out of the braid that Karly had put it in the night before when we'd all been herded into this room. After dinner, they'd taken Aris and put him in a different sleeping area, 'for propriety's sake, ya' see?' Timmy had told us. Even that night, before everything happened in the day that I'd woken up to, that had seemed a bit strange. Aris had been with us, sleeping in the same rooms for over a week in the Maze and another three days here in wherever it was our rescuers had taken us – why were we being separated now? It seemed off and a little cruel to force Aris into a room alone after everything we'd been through – for the three whole days we'd been in this facility, Aris had barely spoken – but we brushed the strangeness of these new sleeping arrangements off then because we desperately wanted this to be the escape it looked like.

I'd tell you what we did in those few days in the rescue unit, but it wasn't much more than eating, sleeping and wondering. If anything, after weeks, months, years of constant movement and calculations, it was more than a little unsettling to be sitting down in a single set of three rooms for as many days. By the third day, restlessness had spread like a virus through the teenagers at the centre.

It didn't help that our rescuers had stopped answering our questions. They'd patched us up and fed us, bringing us food like clockwork every few hours and Timmy and the young, blonde girl with an amethyst nose piercing, called Julie - the one who had shot the Crank outside the bus, would sit with us sometimes. They'd tell us a few things about the outside world – the way that the Flare progressed from irritation to aggression to insanity, how WICKED had been formed and how we'd all been roped into the experiments by some kind of manipulation (economic, emotional and violent depending on the child) but as soon as we asked them about their own project, they clammed up.

"Who are you?" What are you doing with us?" "Won't they come looking for us?" "How did you know we were there?" "How did you get inside?"

All they would tell us was that they were 'working with partners' to 'transfer' us to some kind of safe zone, but that progress was slow. As for who they were, Julie and Timmy just kept saying 'we don't know who's listening, guys – we'll fill you in as soon as we can."

Project Electricity was something that came up time and time again, but strangely, only ever from Julie and Timmy and only ever in whispered conversations – never the announcements to all of us. Something about the Andes, and the chemical that had been found there and the guy they had working on the inside, diverting WICKED's money to the project as quietly as he could. I couldn't say that I understood what they were talking about then, but I just hoped that, whoever he was, WICKED wouldn't catch their guy. Either way, they promised, they'd get us out 'as soon as we can'.

'As soon as we can' was all we ever heard from the team at the centre, but by that morning 'as soon as we can' was looking like it wasn't going to be all that soon. So all we were doing was waiting. Again.

As I sat there, in the half-light that was filtering in from the nearby windows, my eyes drifted from shape to shape in the beds around me, some of them murmuring unintelligible things in their sleep, some turning over, others lying as still as the bodies in my dream. As still as the bodies in the Maze. Poppy wasn't here. Neither was Maisie, Ria or Yana. Or Gigi, Hannah, Edie or Marnie. I hoped the Grievers had killed them quickly. Or the impact had. Not like the boy that I'd seen outside the Walls – N – sobbing and screaming at an invisible yet omnipresent enemy.

Before my brain had time to linger on any of the images that were beginning to filter through the quiet darkness from my subconscious, a sudden ear-piercing shriek filled the air, ringing again and again and all of the lights in the room turned on, flooding my vision with white light and blotches of colour. What on earth? Thirty girls flew upright in the dormitory beds, adding flailing bodies and confused shouts to the rising mayhem.

"What's going on?"

"Is everybody here?"

"Where are the grown-ups?"

"I can't hear you!"

"Has anyone got any weapons?"

"Have WICKED come to get us?"

"It's the sticking Baby alarm!"

That one caught my attention. It was Karly who had said it as she leaped down from the bed above mine, landing with a stumble at my side, her eyes still clouded with sleep. I hadn't realised it at first – the sheer surprise and volume of the sound had numbed my senses – but she was right. The sound was identical to the siren that went off every time supplies and a new Baby came up in the Cage every month in the Maze.

"You're right. But why? Where's it even coming from?"

"There." Charlie's hair was fluffing out of her braid in all directions, but her eyes were wide as she pointed at a grey plastic box that nobody had noticed the night before, not much bigger than a matchbox above the only door in the room. She turned her head between Harriet and me, naively hoping that one of us would have the answer. "Where are Timmy and Julie? And the others? Do we have to fight again?"

It was Harriet who answered first. "I don't know. If everybody would just shut up maybe we'd be able to hear ourselves think long enough to work it out!"

Sonya appeared at Harriet's side. "How can we hear ourselves think over that?!"

In the time we'd been talking, if possible, the alarm had seemed to get louder and louder, but – almost as if it had heard Sonya's words – the noise cut out, leaving only stunned silence in the dormitory.

"Now what?" I whispered. I wasn't sure why, but it seemed almost wrong to speak at a normal volume. "Do you guys hear anything?"

Karly moved towards the door, walking as if she was treading on creaking floorboards, and pressed her ear against it, holding up a finger for silence in the room, as if it hadn't already fallen. After a couple of seconds, she shook her head. "Nothing. Should we go out there?"

"No!"

"No way!"

"Are you crazy? WICKED could just be waiting for us out there!"

They weren't wrong. If Timmy and Julie had been accurate with their stories, then it sounded like WICKED thought we were invaluable – their whole experiment centred on us. Surely they wouldn't just let us leave and the world burn?

I sighed. "And if we stay in here? If WICKED are outside, then the people who rescued us aren't – they've killed them or they've run away. Which would mean we starve in here or we wait for WICKED to break down the door."

Karly caught my drift and carried on. "Or, we can go outside – whatever that was could be a false alarm and the guys we know could be out there with breakfast. 'S not much of a choice, but what's the point in sitting around?"

Nobody looked convinced. By this point, everyone was clustered together in the tiny space in the middle of the room. All of our weapons had been taken in by our rescuers when we'd entered their facility, but a lot of the girls were clutching whatever they could find – rulers, pencils, razors and nail clippers from the nearby bathroom. All of our eyes were fixed on the door, but nobody moved towards it. Sara spoke next:

"Yeah, but if anything does come through that door, it's the only entrance in here. Maybe we could fight them off long enough to come up with a plan?"

"Please." Fear made Karly's voice scathing. "Fight them off with what – nail clippers?"

Sara frowned and opened her mouth to fire an equally scathing retort Karly's way, when another sound started up that made her close it instantly, and everybody else freeze. From behind the closed curtains at the far end of the room came a horrible scraping noise, like nails on a blackboard or sandpaper on a stone. A quiet rustling followed it, before the scratching sound came again. And again and again. Rustle. Scrape. Rustle. Scrape.

Charlie's hand was on my arm, gripping it so tight that half-moon grooves patterned my skin and her shaky voice was barely audible. "Grievers?"

The Gladers holding makeshift weapons tightened their grip and raised them higher. I hope it made them feel better than I did. My throat had closed up and my mouth was suddenly so dry that it took me a few seconds to respond. This noise didn't sound anything like the noises the Grievers had made – which was more of a constant clattering, rumbling squelch – but if it wasn't a Griever, then what the hell was it?

"Can't be. It's too different."

Rustle. Scrape. Rustle. Scrape. Rustle. Scrape. This time, a moan drifted across to us from the curtains, unlike anything I'd ever heard before. The awful sound had an emotion, an emotion that made something scratch against the inside of your own chest, but what it was – it wasn't pain, it wasn't fear or desperation. It was almost hollow, if a noise can be such a thing, like the noise was all there was. As if its owner wanted nothing and everything. As if it needed to be heard, but couldn't convey a thing. Rustle. Scrape. Rustle. Scrape. Another moan, overlapping with the first. Whatever was out there wasn't alone. Horror was written plainly across the faces of everyone in the room.

"Stick this." Karly was at the door again. "I'm not staying in here, girls. Grievers, WICKED, I don't give a damn what that thing is, I'm not gonna be eaten by it."

This time nobody argued. The guys from the rescue team had locked us in that night, just as they had with Aris a few minutes before, 'for safety', they'd said – something else that didn't make sense that our blind hope had allowed us to accept – so I was already looking around the room for something heavy enough to smash the handle, but to my surprise, the handle moved under Karly's fingertips and the door swung open. The space behind the door was totally dark and just as still as the dorm had been before the chorus of moans had begun.

"Any chance anybody packed a torch?" Karly plastered a joking, hopeful expression onto her face, probably for Charlie's benefit. "No? Well, here goes nothing!"

"Wait!" Fi dodged forward and grabbed Karly's shoulder before she could move. "Are you sure we should go out there? There could be ten of those…things."

She wasn't wrong. But who knew what was right, wrong, real or not real anymore? Taking a deep breath in the hope it would restart both my lungs and my circulatory system, I slipped out of Charlie's grip and stepped up next to Karly, resting my hand on her other shoulder. Another moan sounded from outside, louder than those that had gone before. Rustle. Scrape. Rustle. Rustle. Scrape.

"Yeah, but it's Schrodinger's cat, right?" What? Why the hell can I remember Schrodinger's cat but not my own parents? Or even my own name? "You know, that mind thing – when the box with the cat in is closed the cat is both dead and alive because it's one or the other but you don't know which. And the longer you look at the closed box, the more confused you get, but you don't know any more because the box is still closed and the cat is still dead or not dead?"

Twenty-eight blank faces looked back at me – only Iona was nodding slowly. "Ugh – I just mean that there are either monsters out there or not. Those are the only options, and we won't work it out staying in here. What we definitely know is there are monsters out there-" I pointed back towards the window where the curtains were fluttering disconcertingly. "And I will take the possible monsters in the other room over the very real monsters that might get into this one, okay?"

And in this moment of courageous stupidity, I grabbed Karly's hand and a nearby fire extinguisher and we stepped out into the dark. We waited for a second, not moving, not breathing, waiting for the alarm or the landmine or the monster, but nothing happened, so we slowly moved further into the darkness of the room, leaving the moans and rustles behind. After a few seconds, the others followed us one by one into the murky room until the last person – Sara – stepped through and the door closed with a sudden bang, leaving us suspended in total blackness, just as thick as the one in my dream. Don't ya' see, Lilby? I've already told you.

Are you listening to me, Lily? Shut up. You're not exactly a priority right now.

There were some screams from younger Gladers as the last source of light was extinguished, but I barely heard them, desperately trying to make sense of what was going on. The room that our bedroom led off had been a workroom – almost a makeshift Map Room, with sheets of calculations and battered A-Z maps littering the heavy wooden tables around the room. The tables. How had so many of us come into such a small room and not hit one yet?

"Guys?" Yet again, my voice sounded too loud. "Can anybody feel the tables that were in here? This was the workroom, right?"

Sonya's voice came from somewhere to my left. "Yeah. I can feel the same bumps on the wallpaper. But I haven't felt the tables. Or the chairs that were in here."

Her words were echoed by a chorus of: "Same", "No", "Me neither" from the Gladers scattered amongst the darkness.

"I think the lightswitch was somewhere over here." Raven, maybe? "Unless I've gone the wrong way."

There was the sound of quiet scuffling as she felt her way across the wallpaper and around the others, and then, at the same time as Iona suddenly said "Um, guys? There's something on the floor here…" there was a clicking sound and light filled the room. Just as quickly, I felt a scream rip involuntarily from my throat at the sight illuminated in front of Iona.

The room was empty, no sign of the enormous tables that had been there the night before – how had they been moved? The bases were as thick as tree trunks – there weren't even any marks on the floor, but it would take three men to pick them up? The walls were bare, except for the pale coral wallpaper and the linoleum was completely spotless, all of the maps and the pencils and the crumpled messages that had been there the night before gone without a trace.

The room was empty. Except for the body lying at Iona's feet, blood already seeping into the white of her trainers as she stood, staring, motionless.

There was no question that the person was dead, and probably had been for hours. The body had belonged to a young woman, her clothes torn and stiff with dried blood, but wounds had morphed her features until they were virtually unrecognisable, blood staining her blonde hair an eerie auburn, matting the strands, and tinging the amethyst stud still glittering in her nose to a crimson ruby.

"Julie."

Harriet's voice was raw. No. Hours before, Julie had told me about her nephews in Denver – Silas and Otto – and how, as soon as they'd got us out and Project Electricity was active, she was going to take a Berg and join them because their mother had died in the Sun Flares and she never wanted them to forget her, wanted them to go to school and live the lives they hadn't been able to. Now who would remind them of either woman? Tears pricked at my eyes even as my stomach roiled at the sight of her mutilated form.

"Where are the others?" Mariella's eyes were as wide as mine felt and her voice was rising. "Where are Greg and Andrea and Timmy? Are they dead too?"

The facility was still. There was no sign of our rescuers or even of WICKED. We were alone again.

"It doesn't matter, does it?" Harriet stated, the tremor not quite leaving her voice, but she stood straighter, looking more like the leader she'd been for so long in the Glade. "They're not here. For whatever reason, they've buggered off. It's just us. So we're going to work out what to do; everybody search the room for something – a clue, an escape, anything."

And when nobody moved, the fear disappeared completely from her face and she barked: "Now!"

I ran back to the door we'd come through and tried the handle. It was locked. How? I tried again, but this time the handle wouldn't even turn. It definitely hadn't been locked before. The longer we stayed in that room the less and less this felt like an accident. Or a rescue. Whoever, or whatever, had control of the facility wanted us in this room. The only other door led to a toilet and there were no windows - we didn't even know where we were in the building, let alone in the world. The rest of the Gladers and I were so focused on searching the edges of the room and the tiny bathroom that came off it that nobody noticed Charlie make her way towards the motionless body until her voice rose above the others.

"Lily? Harriet? Look at this…"

Charlie was kneeling at the side of Julie's body, blood on her knees and her fingertips, but in her right hand was a single piece of scarlet paper, screwed into a ball. Now she'd got our attention, her voice was quiet again. "She was holding it."

I took the ball she held out to me, trying to stop my hands shaking enough to open it, ignoring the blood that now covered my fingertips too. The ink was smudged so badly that the writing was barely legible, but by holding it up to the light I could just make out the words.

"Ladies, trust nothing and no-one. Not even yourselves. Sincerely-" My voice caught in my throat, as I stared at the confirmation of a horrific idea that had already begun to form in my mind. "The Creators."

For the first time in what felt like hours, but couldn't have been more than twenty minutes, the room filled with noise.

"What?!"

"That's not possible, give it here, Lily!"

"Let me read it."

"The Creators? How did they get here?"

"But we solved the Maze!"

"We escaped! How can we have ended up with WICKED again?"

"We never left." Karly's arms were folded, her expression closed off as everyone turned to her. She took a deep breath. "That's the only possible solution. This place-" She gestured around the coral-walled prison. "Is just an extension of their facility. The 'rescuers' must have been actors-"

"Which explains why they couldn't tell us anything." I finished. "Because it was a lie. So this is just another Maze? The next level of the game?"

Everyone was silent for a long second, nobody quite letting the enormity of the realisation register because I think we might all have cried. Everybody left was stronger than that.

"But there's nothing to solve." Sonya was running her fingers through her hair. "There aren't even any windows."

"There's that." Fiona was pointing at the letter in my hand. "There's writing on the back, Lil, what's that?"

"Oh!" I flipped it over, trying to smooth the creases out of the paper by balancing it on my leg. The letters on this side were even more blurred than the first but, just about legible was:

Thank you for your participation. Please seat yourselves in the sector of the room closest to the dormitory and face the far wall for the initiation of Phase Two. Your immediate compliance is required, or there will be consequences.

I read the words out to the group before handing the letter across to Harriet and Sonya. After scanning the letter herself, Harriet just nodded. "Looks like you're right, Lil. This is the next level."

She turned the letter over again, holding it up to the light, before casting a glance around the room. "And looks like these sticks have given us our only option. Unless any of you fancy finding out what 'consequences' means to these people?"

Everybody's gaze drifted involuntarily down to the body on the floor.

We sat down and faced the wall.

The second the last person sat down, a blue light started to flicker on the wall we were facing and a whirring noise came from directly behind us. Sonya said quietly:

"Don't turn round, girls. They said face the wall."

That went against every basic human instinct I had, but I forced myself to pick a bump on the coral wallpaper and stare at it until my eyes itched. The whirring ramped up a notch and seemed to get closer, followed by a thud, a rattle and something that sounded like a computer keyboard. Karly just groaned, though I felt her stiffen beside me.

"I'm so over this guess the monster from the sound crap. It's like kindergarten on crack – the cow goes moo and the flesh-eating Griever goes screech. For God's sake."

"I assure you, Miss Linnaeus, that will soon be the least of your worries."

No vague words on a piece of paper could override this instinct as we all spun around. The body – Julie – was gone. In its place was a large wooden writing desk and leaning against it was a man dressed in white. And when I say a man dressed in white, I mean entirely – socks, tie, suit, shoes, everything. He had black hair that was perfectly trimmed, a long nose that seemed slightly twisted and blue eyes that darted from one of us to the other, settling nowhere and seeming to take in and analyse all of us at once. The man frowned at the sight.

"Hmm. You're all lucky your instruction was suspended when I entered the room or else you would all have suffered for your lack of self-control, ladies." He sighed, as if we'd disappointed him already and stepped forward.

"Anyway. My name is A.D Janson and I represent a group called WICKED. Hopefully, the members of our team who have spent the last few days with you - Timothy and co. – have explained the basis of your purpose with us. Quite simply, you children have the chance to change the course of history, science and indeed the future of the whole human race. Everything circumstance that you have encountered up 'til now – we call them Variables - has been carefully planned and constructed by world-renowned scientists, designed to produce emotion that allow us to study your brain patterns in order to find a cure for the Flare."

"I understand you all got a taste of the effects of that disease at the closure of the Maze Trials – the man outside the bus was an unexpected addition to the Trial, but one we found highly effective so we delayed removing him. He was a useful learning tool-"

I could feel my temperature rising. He was a human being. Just like Marnie and Sophie and Edie and Ann and Julie. I ran my fingers back and forth over the lizard pendant at my throat, feeling the familiar grooves and notches.

"-in addition to your experiences this morning with the Cranks outside your window. Though I understand you left the curtains closed – a decision that Group A failed to make, but we'll return to them shortly."

Group A? We all shared confused expressions. There was another Group?

"Your attention, please, ladies!" The man was looking down his disconcertingly long nose at us now, his eyes narrowed. "As I said, we will return to Group A shortly. You understand that improving treatment for such a disease is imperative and you are a big part of that fight. And you'll have incentive to work with us, because, sad to say, each one of you has already caught the virus."

A.D Janson held up his hands to quiet the fevered murmuring that started. "Now, now, ladies. No need to panic – the Flare takes some time to set in and show its symptoms. But at the end of these Trials, the cure will be your reward, and you'll never see the…debilitating effects."

I was hot and cold all over at his words, goosebumps running over my arms. My mind, and every other mind in the room, flashed back to the man banging his head against the bus screaming. 'You can run, run, run, children, but you can't hide. No fun, no fun, no fun. He wasn't kidding. Janson's statement made everybody shift in their seats, people's hands went up to their throats, others stared intently at the people around them as if they could somehow detect the mutating virus with their eyes alone. 'It's an awful, awful disease. I'd rather shoot myself than get it.' Timmy's words from the coach echoed in my mind too. While I was no longer certain that anything he'd said was true, that seemed indisputable. Well played, WICKED. We weren't going anywhere. Janson coughed, like this was just the warm-up speech, and now we were getting to the hard part.

"Right. Now that all of you understand how imperative your participation in this Trial is, both for humankind and yourselves, I shall move on to the part that is really important, and the part where you will be rewarded for your superior performance in the Maze Trials."

Superior performance?

"As you may have deduced from my comments earlier, there were two groups put into identical mazes in the Trial you have just completed. The singular difference between the two was that Group B was made up of female subjects – yourselves – and Group A was made up of male subjects. Although the performance of both groups was highly impressive, you completed the Maze Trials faster than Group A and with half the casualties, and therefore will receive the easier task in the upcoming Trial."

My mind was racing – there was a boys' Maze? Without thinking, I rubbed my thumb over the single letter carved into the back of my lizard. If there was a boys' Maze… N's face appeared in my mind with perfect clarity.

Is that where you are?

It was almost funny that the theory where 'N' was a teenage boy trapped in a simulated Maze with fifty other boys and mechanised monsters was suddenly the most believable. But then I thought about the rest of Janson's declaration. 'Half the casualties'. That meant at least twenty boys had died escaping the Maze. For the second time that day, I felt my eyes fill with tears and blinked them back furiously. I wasn't going to cry in front of one of WICKED's emotionless minions. But even if 'N' hadn't been one of them, if he wasn't even real… twenty boys, murdered. And if he had been? No. I wonder, would I have felt it?

A.D Janson had carried on, pulling a file out of the black leather briefcase that was balanced on the table.

"Here is your task, Group B. Pay attention or you will suffer for it. In precisely two hours time, a Flat Trans – a transportation device – will appear in this room. I will be here to ensure that everyone enters it, there is no choice in participation at this point. The Flat Trans will deposit you in a series of underground tunnels. You will follow the maps we will provide you with until a specific point – which will be clear once you reach it – and you will then climb out of the tunnels into a desert area called The Scorch. From this point you must locate Group A."

"Are we joining them or something?" Sonya asked.

Janson raised his eyebrows again. "If you would all kindly stop interrupting me, then this information would become clear much faster, Miss Sarandon. And to answer your question, no. You are not."

He turned back to the briefcase and pulled out a long square tablet, about the size of a piece of paper and turned it on – a boy's face filled the screen. He looked young, younger than me, but not much. He had thick dark brown hair that flopped over his forehead and eyes of exactly the same shade. It's those eyes that fool you – they're so much older than the rest of him.

"This is Thomas Edison. Subject A2. It is of the utmost importance that you remember his face. As one of the key players in Group A's escape from the Maze, he will be heavily protected by those of his own group. However, he is a poor fighter, saved thus far only by his intelligence and forward-planning. Your task is to kidnap Thomas, separating him from Group A, and take him to a specific facility in the deep Scorch, also marked on your maps."

Janson paused and we all looked from the portrait of Thomas to each other. That doesn't sound so hard. We can fight and we've got thirty people to their twenty. But Janson hadn't finished.

"Upon reaching this facility, your job is simply to kill him."

What?

"No!"

It took me a couple of seconds to realise that the cry was my own. The more than twenty boys were still there in my mind, just as clearly as the fifteen girls we'd lost to the Maze over the years. What would adding another dead body to those ranks do? The more I looked at the face on the screen, the more this Thomas looked like just one more frightened kid who'd seen too much. I said it again: "No, sir."

Karly nodded: "We're not killing anyone, Mr."

Other people joined in then, Charlie adamantly folding her arms and frowning at the white-suited man, girls across the room started shaking their heads, joining in with their own refusal. Even Harriet called out:

"What's the point, sir?" She leaned so heavily on the 'sir', that it seemed almost sarcastic. "What kind of brain patterns do you get from a corpse?"

A.D Janson had looked up from his tablet by now, surprise painted across his strange features, so defined they almost seemed to be shifting. He quickly rearranged his expression into something resembling pitying disapproval.

"Ladies, I know how difficult it is for some of you to contemplate the immense sacrifice and martyrdom that finding such a treatment for the Flare requires-"

"What do you know?" Even I was surprised by the venom in my voice as Raven and Fi craned their necks to look at me. "What can you possibly know?"

For the first time, the man's eyes met mine and, for the first time, he looked a little sad, just like the woman in the WICKED centre had, before simply looking irritated with us again.

"More than you can possibly know, Miss Pasteur." His voice was ice-cold. "Assumptions will get you nowhere in such a difficult Trial. I would advise you not to make silly mistakes like that in the Trial itself –uncontrollable emotion is the first sign of the Flare, you know."

A smirk played with the edges of his lips and I'd never hated anyone more than I hated A.D Janson in that moment. What kind of world did we live in where refusing to murder some kid we didn't know was nothing more than a 'silly mistake'?

"Now." Janson seemed to be relishing his re-established control, his gaze fixing all of us in place, one at a time. "As you all seem to be having problems accepting this task, and I would rather not see you all face the…consequences of refusing to complete it, I have someone to introduce you to."

Behind him, a door slid open from a piece of wall that had definitely been solid seconds before and, to our surprise, a young girl walked through it. She too looked slightly younger than Karly and I, with alabaster white skin and thick black hair that came down to her lower back. Her face was scratched as badly as ours were, but her eyes were defiant and bright blue, her head up and her hands on her hips as if she dared us to challenge her. A.D Janson waved her up to stand next to him and continued with the next act of his tragedy.

"Ladies, you may or may not have noticed that a member of your group is missing – Aris Jones."

Aris. I felt a sudden pang of guilt tugging in my chest. With everything that had happened – alarms, Cranks, dead bodies and white-suited strangers – Aris and his separate room had completely vanished from my mind.

"What have you done with him?" Charlie. Her voice was soft, as always, but not without accusation and her frown was still there. Though she never talked about it, Charlie knew well that Aris and Rachel had saved her life in the Maze and was determined to repay him for it.

"Don't concern yourself, Miss Darwin. Mr Jones is perfectly unharmed. However, for the suitability and effectiveness of the upcoming task, we have initiated a swap. This is Teresa Agnes, subject A1. She has come from Group A's Trial and will be working with you to complete your task, as Aris Jones will have a role to play alongside our other male subjects. And, for those of you with qualms about dispatching Thomas Edison, what Teresa has to say may well change your mind. Teresa?"

A.D Janson gestured to Teresa and she took a small step forward and lifted her chin even higher, meeting the eyes of as many of us as she could before she started to speak. There was definitely something chilling about her eyes.

"Thomas Edison is a monster." She paused and let that damning judgement sink in, her lips pressed together in a thin line as she selected her next words. "I can't tell you every atrocity that he's committed, towards me and those around him, because I can't possibly relive it all, but I can tell you that he manipulated the Group A boys into losing their lives so that he could survive. For example, your subject 2 – Rachel, was it? – was killed."

Some people flinched.

"Well, the Trials are supposed to be identical, right? But he's still alive. Not because our subject 36 didn't throw a knife at him but because Thomas forced our subject 50, a twelve year old boy, to jump in front of it. He – he died instead."

Nobody spoke. I looked towards Charlie, leaning against Karly's shoulder, her hand in Sonya's, barely twelve years old herself. That knife in her chest, blood on her lips, Charlie making that horrible, wheezing, gasping sound as the life rushed out of her – Karly pulled the smaller girl closer to her chest. Tears were shining in Teresa's eyes and as she spoke, some of them spilled over her long eyelashes and ran down her cheeks. Her hands were shaking and her voice was thick as she carried on.

"The Trial needs someone to die. It's the only way that the cure will be complete. And Thomas Edison is the only person here who deserves to die."

The hatred in her voice and on her face were unmistakable now as she clenched her fists, her jaw set. "And I will be the one to kill him. For those boys. For the disgusting way he has treated me. For little Chuck. But I can't do it alone – and all you girls would walk away with would be the cure and the knowledge that you avenged their deaths."

Still nobody said a word. But nobody could deny that the appearance of the boy on the iPad suddenly appeared more sinister, his expression more cunning, his appearance of innocence transformed into one of manipulation. Yes, those eyes have seen atrocities, but how many of them did he engineer?

Janson placed a hand on Teresa's shoulder, helping her down into the chair behind the desk and passing her a spotless white handkerchief from the breast pocket of his suit. Worried looks were passing between our group, everyone asking the same questions with their eyes: but is that enough? Can we do it?

"Now ladies, do you see what I mean? We are not asking you to orchestrate the destruction of an innocent, but a monster. And, just in case you needed any further motivation, may I remind you of the Swipe devices that we have positioned in your brains. They do not only block your personal memories, but enable us to control your every move. Of course, that is not their primary function – 99% of the time, you will have full control over your own movement – however, if we choose, WICKED have the power to create any scene we desire."

"Which means what, Andrex?" Karly's voice was harsh, her patience with A.D Janson clearly running as thin as mine was.

He ignored her insult and calmly answered. "Which means, Miss Linnaeus that we are in control. If you are all so opposed to the idea of killing Thomas Edison, a manipulative murderer, I'd like you to think about what it would be like for you to kill each other. For you to kill those sitting next to you and not being able to prevent it – to merely watch, powerless, behind your own eyes, as you destroy those closest to you. That is what refusal would mean, Miss Linnaeus. Group B."

I felt sick, even though I hadn't eaten in at least fourteen hours.

Checkmate.

Harriet answered for everyone, knowing that we would not – could not – contradict the answer.

"We'll do it."

8:55 AM - Two Hours Later – The Flat Trans

There was a sick sense of déjà vu about 8:55 that morning. All of the Gladers, plus Teresa, were gathering in front of a door, armed to the teeth and terrified.

A.D. Janson and WICKED had given us forty-five minutes to replenish ourselves after we received the brief. Janson had given us each a waterproof rucksack containing two weeks' worth of food, water canteens, rope, a blanket, a raincoat and a first aid kit. Then we had been led into a fourth room, down a corridor that had not existed the night before. It was almost an exact replica of our Weapons Room back in the Maze. Every weapon you can think of, excluding a gun, was there and in the centre of a room were clipboards, pencils and paper, just like we'd stored in the Map Room. Janson announced that we would have exactly sixty minutes to select our weapons for the expedition, plan our attack upon Group A and generally prepare ourselves for the Trial. I'd picked out a sharp knife with a long handle – deadly but could also be used to knock people over, knock them out or simply disable them from combat, without death being involved. Karly had found a bow and two quivers; one full of arrows with rounded rubber ends and the others with wickedly sharp metal edges. Harriet chose a spear and Sonya, a leather-sheathed dagger. We'd already realised that Thomas being a poor fighter didn't mean that the other survivors were – in fact, it probably meant the opposite. And that meant that we had to be ready to fight the boys as well, in which case, we'd take every advantage we could get. But even as we selected the weapons to take Group A down, we did so in virtual silence. Nobody could shake the nagging feeling that something about this was intrinsically wrong. They've been through just as much as us.

Five minutes to go before the Flat Trans materialised, and we were still frantically forcing as many supplies into the small rucksacks as we could, making sure that everyone had as many weapons as they could sensibly carry and that the weight was distributed evenly. I adjusted the straps of Fi's rucksack, then Raven's, then Mariella's, then Rani's, then Charlie's before Teresa appeared.

"Excuse me?" I looked up from the straps of my own rucksack to see her holding hers out with a slight smile that didn't quite reach her ice blue eyes. "Would you mind fixing mine?"

"Um, sure. Pass it here." I attempted an answering smile. As unsettling as Teresa already was, I decided that it couldn't be easy to suddenly be switched from one group to another. To be taken from everybody you'd been through so much with and thrown in with a bunch of strangers. I guess I hoped somebody was adjusting the straps on Aris' rucksack. I'd just taken the bag from the younger girl and was fiddling with the clasps when she suddenly said:

"What's that? Around your neck?"

My hands immediately went to my throat, instinctively holding onto N's pendant. "I'm not sure. It's some kind of lizard. A newt, maybe? A salamander?"

Teresa kept her eyes fixed on it, in a way that didn't convince me to let go, fixed on the carved 'N' that had swung round to the front. She was silent for another few seconds until:

"Wait – your name's Lily, isn't it?"

"Yes." I almost laughed, but the strange expression that flickered across her face stopped it in my throat. "Why?"

Teresa just nodded, as if she was considering something. "In Group A, there was a boy with a wristband, he-"

"What?"

The same expression, before her face became impassive again and she shook her head and took her adjusted rucksack from me. "He –oh - nothing. Thanks, Lily."

A boy with a wristband. My dream; the leather bracelet with my name on it on my wrist, the lizard pendant around his neck. And if I had N's lizard...

I'd have grabbed Teresa 's arm, questioned her further, if A.D Janson hadn't suddenly stepped in front of us, his cough rising above the voices in the room. "Group B! To me, immediately."

While we had been collecting supplies, Janson had been sitting at the wooden desk in the middle of the room reading a small paperback book, only occasionally looking up to criticise somebody's pack. He had been silent for over an hour until the clocks on our new watches read 9:00.

"Now, ladies. To repeat the instructions." He was doing that disconcerting thing where he was looking all of us dead in the eye as he spoke, pacing along the line this time. "You must navigate your way through these tunnels until you reach the specified point. Then you will make your way into the Scorch, where you will intercept Group A and do as instructed with Thomas Edison. After this task has been carried out, you must complete your journey by making it to the Safe Haven, approximately thirty miles north from there, by the end of the two week window. Then, and only then, will you obtain the Cure."

As he paced up and down our ranks, I couldn't help but feel again that there was something deeply strange about A.D Janson. Aside from his facial features – something about him definitely reminded me of a desert rat – there was something too shiny, too perfect about the man. Even after two hours in this room which had been covered in Julie's blood when we awoke, this man's white brogues remained absolutely spotless. An immaculate weasel.

"Listen to me, ladies, because I am only going to say this once."

Out of the corner of my vision, I saw Karly roll her eyes and mouth 'thank God'. Luckily, Janson was too busy making eye contact to notice.

He was getting closer and I saw Charlie flinch as he put a hand on her shoulder and looked her in the eyes. "Not having any real understanding of your outside world, you may wonder what the raincoats in your packs are for. The weather in the desert has been sporadic for the last five years. Fifty degree heat to monsoons to thunder and lightning in less than five minutes. Do not assume you understand your surroundings – a single hurricane could kill every one of you."

It was my turn. His hand was surprisingly cool, and I couldn't decide whether that made the experience more unpleasant. "Ladies, the same goes for the electric storms. Be mindful of them. They've killed more travellers and expedition teams than all the Cranks there put together."

His eyes, when they locked with mine, were blue. Not the piercing ice-blue of Teresa's or the soft blue-grey of Charlie's but the deep blue of the darkening sky when we had 'escaped' the WICKED complex before the heavens opened on top of us. They sent a shiver straight through my body and I was glad when he moved across to Mariella.

"Furthermore, it is absolutely vital that you consider the note we left. Otherwise you are bigger fools than we took you for when you were trained. Trust nothing and no-one. Not even yourselves. Your senses are not your friends in the Scorch or in the Trials."

Exactly on time, the whirring sound that we had heard when he arrived filled the small chamber and the air in front of us suddenly seemed to shimmer. The Flat Trans. We shared nervous looks with each other, but nobody stepped back. Everybody left was stronger than that.

Janson gave us a final condescending smirk before sweeping his arm towards the Flat Trans that had opened up in front of us.

"Good luck, ladies. Welcome to the Scorch."


	25. Running, Raids and Confusing Reunions

**Chapter 25 - Running, Raids and Confusing Reunions**

**Ten Days Later**

"These boys better be really, really hot." Karly gasped as we staggered up to the top of yet another underground incline on our way to Janson's specified point to meet Group A.

"Don't get your hopes up." The sporadic half-light of the tunnels illuminated Teresa's wry smile a few steps ahead as the scattered laughter of those who had heard echoed off the walls.

If we'd been tracking the days correctly, we'd been in the web of tunnels for just over a week. The walls were polished metal, the floors nothing more than dirt packed hard by the tens of people who must have come through here before us.

At first, we'd thought the tunnels belonged to WICKED, another Maze-like structure, but the more we looked around as we walked (and there was very little else to do, other than thinking about Thomas Edison, which all of us were trying not to do) the more it became clear that the tunnels had another use. There had once been long strips of circular lights running the whole length of the tunnel, but by now, barely any of them were working – we would walk miles in total darkness, other times there would be five or six working bulbs in one area. The only daylight we'd seen was in the occasional sections of the tunnel that contained 500m skylights and an emergency exit. Every 100m or so were the remains of emergency telephones – most of which appeared to have been gutted with something, circuits sparking and insulated wires hanging out like electronic entrails. There were markings and ragged posters all over the walls – some advertising local fast-food stores, others advertising theatres and gyms in towns that had once been nearby. These had all been covered over more recently with laminated signs describing the progression of the Flare and an emergency number for 'sightings'. Like wild animals. Nobody read those more than once.

One of the eeriest things about the tunnels was the jumble of random objects that littered them, fragments of discarded humanity. More books than you could count – classics like 1988, Treasure Island, Jane Eyre and Grapes of Wrath, mixed in with 'Watership Down', 'Harry Potter' and a disconcerting number of survival pamphlets – all of them slightly damp and yellowed from the humidity and the air down there, broken Kodak cameras, odd items of clothing, yellowed and riddled with holes, and lone childrens' toys slumping in corners, abandoned to the dust, the lint balls and the damp. Why they had been discarded – an escape to a new life, succumbing to the Flare or succumbing to one of its victims – we couldn't know for sure, but, in the almost continual half-light, our imaginations were more than willing to fill in the gaps.

I mean, the Cranks had also been a pretty big clue that these tunnels didn't belong to WICKED. There were signs of them everywhere: some Flare posters that had been torn down from the walls, their protective plastic splintered, abuse scrawled over others, the remains of what looked like disembowelled animals that I'd rather not think about appeared every mile or so and, in a number of the cubicles where the emergency telephones had been, there were deep scratches in the walls that no desert animal could have made. As sickening as all of that was, it was the easy part. In some of the other emergency cubicles, there actually were Cranks – usually one, maybe two – rocking backwards and forwards in the narrow space, gnawing or mumbling incantations into the darkness. Some of them shouted at us, others didn't. We never stopped either way.

It was on the sixth day, about fifty miles deep in the tunnels that we met the wandering band of Cranks near Emergency Exit 87. Like the man we'd seen outside the bus, they were wearing normal clothes, but their bodies were emaciated, worn away in the tunnels, their faces scratched and bleeding. They didn't even wait to speak before they leaped at us, seven or eight of them, tearing at our packs and our faces, screaming unintelligible abuse all the while. They were so strong. Even the smaller ones. But they were so far Gone that it only took a few well-aimed arrows and fifteen minutes before they lay on the ground around us. There was something immensely different between killing a mechanised monstrous slug in a Maze and killing a breathing human being. Nobody spoke for hours after that. To my surprise, it was Teresa who had mentioned it first, as we tried to force beef jerky and apples down our throats that night:

"We had no choice. They'd have followed us otherwise. We could have lost people and they would have attracted others."

I didn't ask her why she was so sure. I didn't want to think about there being an alternative to what we had done to them.

The only other unusual encounter we'd had with Cranks had happened the day before. Clanging sounds had echoed up the tunnel from one of the nearby junctions. Instantly, we'd formed a huddle, weapons out – bows, arrows and spears pointed towards the source of the noise. After a few of seconds, a couple had appeared from around the corner – the thumping had been their feet as they ran across the dusty ground. One of the figures was male, the other female, both tall and thin and both had wrapped their heads and faces in frayed beige cloth with slits cut for them to see and breathe through. The only visible parts of their bodies were their hands – the skin scorched to a dark red, cracks and oozing blisters standing out against it.

They'd told us they were Cranks from a city up ahead. Told us that not all Cranks were 'past the Gone' – so sick that they were animals. Some of them were still human, just not the humans they had been. Told us we had to learn 'who to make friends with and who to avoid. Or kill' and that we'd 'better learn quick if you're coming our way.' The two had demanded to know where we'd come from, how we'd got here, asking with a feverish intensity from the eight metre distance they kept between themselves and our spears, but as soon as we mentioned WICKED and our task, they lost interest. WICKED were clearly old news around here. They told us one last thing before sprinting back off up an emergency exit, leaving us blinking in the burning shaft of daylight they'd created:

"If you don't have it yet, you'll have it soon."

And so we kept walking. Walking. Rest. Food. Sleep. Toilet break. Running. Walking. Food. Walking. Running. Rest. Sleep. Walking. Running. Every once in a while we'd meet a fork in the road and pull out the maps to decipher Janson's instructions and hope we hadn't turned the wrong way somewhere else and were walking blindly into the den of a flesh-eating horde or a sea of empty tunnels where we'd eventually starve. So, we'd been wandering through like that, checking the maps whenever there was a light, rationing food, sleeping whenever we couldn't stand and keeping lookouts as often as we could.

Until Sonya, at the front of the group on the tenth day, stumbled and stopped – so suddenly that Mariella went careening into the back of her, almost knocking her into Harriet.

"What is it?"

"Why have we stopped?"

"If we stop, Sonny, I'll never be able to start going again."

"Shush a minute, guys." Sonya pulled her rucksack off her back and rummaged around in it for the map we'd been given, before pointing down at whatever had tripped her up. "Look. I think this is it. And the instructions say it wouldn't be glowing unless Group A were in visible range."

Embedded in the earth by Sonya's feet was a 'W' crisscrossed with lines, so small it could have been mistaken for a broken VW badge, except for the fact that the metal was shining with the same blue light that had appeared when Janson arrived back at the Rescue Centre. This was what we'd been looking for for ten days – a badge the size of a bottle cap?

Charlie had found her map now and offered it to Sonya, her fingers resting on the identical symbol in the centre and the words below it, printed in the same cerulean. INITIATE MISSION.

"Well that's helpful." Everyone was clustered around the blue W, trying to make sense of the information and Karly was standing at the front, her arms crossed and her eyebrows raised. "We're in a metal rabbit warren. How do we 'initiate mission' from down here?"

Charlie frowned and picked up the map from the ground, her grey-blue eyes focused on the symbol. "Can I try something, Harriet?"

Harriet looked surprised and a little pleased that she was still being consulted – without words Teresa had made it very clear that she was assuming the role of leader in this task, and with her knowledge of both Thomas Edison and Group A, we hadn't staged a coup yet. "'Course, Charl. Last time you did that, you got us out of the Maze, didn't you, whiz kid?"

Charlie smiled briefly but her eyes never left the symbol as she stepped back and forth on the spot, holding the map at 90 degrees. "It's just that I thought I saw something on it earlier – when they first gave it to us next to the Flat Trans – but then it disappeared. But this light is the same, so if I could just – yes!"

The younger girl stopped dead, holding the map completely still and blowing her hair out of her face. "There."

As she held the map and the ink symbol itself over the metal symbol in the ground, slowly but surely, more letters began to form on the paper, illuminated by the blue light.

LEAVE VIA THE NEAREST EMERGENCY EXIT. OBSERVE ALL SIGNS, LADIES – J.

"All that just to tell us to use the fire exit?" Mariella rolled her eyes, but as she was closest to the ladder, swung herself up onto it. "Now what did he mean about the sign? We've seen most of these before."

Mariella was right – the majority of the posters on the emergency exit shaft that we'd all crowded into seemed to just be photocopies of the ones that had lined the walls for the last forty miles: Flare warnings, emergency numbers and restaurant advertisements. But, near the top of the ladder, just below the wheel that would allow us to open the escape hatch was a small red sign, almost hidden behind the bars.

"What about that one, Ella? By the wheel?" I called up. She saw it too and climbed up a couple of rungs until the sign was at eye level.

"Yeah...yeah, we haven't seen this one before. It's a warning sign. It says 'Location Warning: extreme heat.' And then there's another one that's been stuck below it that says: 'Location warning: flat ground?' Guess we'd better sort those before we think about anything else?"

Mariella leapt back down to the ground as Teresa frowned and stepped forward.

"Okay, so extreme heat is obvious. We saw it with those Cranks yesterday – it's clearly at least 45 degrees centigrade out there and it's desert, so there isn't going to be any protection."

Fi's voice came from the back of the crowd: "Should we do what those Cranks did? Rip up things and cover our skin with it?"

"No." Harriet shook her head. "We'll need the sheets. Both for protection when we sleep and if we run out of water. We've all got sunscreen in those first aid kits, right? If we use that and then just use the sheets as protection if the sun comes up?"

Teresa nodded. "Fine. Whatever. But why would 'flat ground' be a warning? Surely that's a good thing – we're not going to waste energy."

Raven, who had been deputy of the Trackers in the Maze, scrunched her nose up.

"That's true – if there was any kind of incline, the warning would make sense – exertion, trip hazards – but if it's flat…"

"Then it can't be about that." I was thinking about Janson's warning, that nothing was as it seemed. "You said that second warning was stuck on, right?" Mariella nodded. "Then maybe it's not a warning for everyone, but just one for us."

Sonya was frowning too, but she seemed to understand me. "Right. So, maybe it's more about our mission than the land itself."

Karly, next to me, suddenly gasped and jumped in. "Yes! That's it – observation. Other than the actual freaking running, observation was the most important thing in the Maze. If there are mountains and rocks and stuff, then we could hide, but if it's flat ground-"

"-then the boys are going to see us the second we get out there." I finished.

Teresa nodded again, her face full of focused concentration now that we'd solved the next mystery. "That's fine." She picked her weapon up off the floor – a thick branch with a serrated blade strapped onto the end of it. "We just start the plan immediately. I'll go first, you follow me. Does everyone remember what we're going to do?"

We nodded. We'd talked about it so much that I'm pretty sure it was etched into all of our brains like the lines of a Broadway actor who'd been playing the same role for three years – any of us could have taken any part.

"Good." She climbed deftly up the ladder and opened the escape hatch slightly, letting in the light of the approaching dawn a few centimetres at a time so our eyes could adjust. Waves of sand blew in through the gap she'd left and crusted on the floor and over our clothes and rucksacks. Then Teresa put her eyes to the gap, before pulling back to take one final look at us. "They're there. 200 metres or so – there's about ten of them and it doesn't look like they're armed. So remember girls, surround them, weapons out and look like you'd happily stab them in the gut. Don't kill any of the others unless we have to."

She didn't have to tell us twice. Charlie didn't look convinced, so I leaned over to her.

"Got your nasty face ready, kiddo?"

"Grrr!" Charlie blinked up at me in the light and narrowed her eyes, baring her teeth, frowning as hard as she could. I laughed quietly, attracting an irritated glare from Teresa. "Like that?"

"Steady on, Stitch! That was pretty good – less teeth though, and then you'll send them running, 'kay?"

She grinned, adjusted her expression and growled again softly, but her eyes were fixed on the escape hatch, her hands in her pockets in an effort to stop them shaking. Teresa was speaking again.

"Get ready with the bag, ladies, and stick to the script. Follow me quickly, 'cause we need to take them by surprise. It's the only way that bastard will get what he deserves. Harriet, Sonya next to me, Lily, Karly take the back. Here we go – weapons ready."

As the girls assembled on the ladder and Karly and I took our places bringing up the rear, I felt my stomach flip over, and not just because of the mission. My fingers drifted to the lizard.

'Promise me, Lily.'

I don't know what I promised you, N. I hope this isn't breaking it.

The familiar feeling of nausea was creeping through my body along with the adrenaline. I didn't want to hurt these boys – they'd been through the same hell we had, had been just as brave, just as smart and a little less lucky - and I just hoped Teresa's plan would work, so we wouldn't have to. I felt the note that I'd scribbled the night before in a moment of madness – or hope, take your pick - shift in my pocket. What if he's not there? What if he died? What if he isn't even real? Then at least I'd know.

I took my knife from Karly. And Teresa opened the hatch.

The Scorch

They didn't call it the Scorch for nothing. Even though it was dawn and the sun was only just peeking over the horizon, the heat hit us like a wave as soon as we stepped out into desert – and immediately sunk three centimetres into the sand, blinking against the grains being blown into our eyes. Time to go. As soon as our eyes had adjusted, everyone assumed the planned V-formation behind Teresa. The adrenaline coursing through my body made my hands shake around the knife I was clutching, trying to keep my face impassive as we surrounded Group A before they had time to react, weapons pointed towards them amid their cries and murmurs of confusion. I hope this is quick.

I saw Aris first. He was standing on the edge of the group of about twenty ragged boys, his eyes wide as he spun in a circle, taking all of us in without meeting our eyes. He was dirtier than the last time I'd seen him – as I'm sure we were – and there was a long red cut snaking from his jaw to his nose but he seemed relatively unharmed. Like all the others, he was unarmed, and a white sheet filled with water bags and food scraps was in his right hand.

It was the boy standing next to Aris that Teresa was looking at, that most of the group were looking at. His dark brown hair was matted and falling into his face, and like Aris, his eyes were filled with shock as he stared right back at Teresa. Thomas. As I looked at him, the same feeling that had come over me in the Rescue Centre scraped away at my conscience again. He didn't look like a monster, an abuser, a manipulator. I know that's often the point, but his stance – hunched shoulders, taking a step back and leaving himself wide open to attack - the confusion and something that looked like hurt on his young face, the cuts and bruises all over him. He looked like a kid, and I thought again about my note, feeling more certain of what I'd scrawled there. To my surprise, to his left was a girl with thick brown hair pulled back into a ponytail – Janson hadn't mentioned a girl. From the way she was scowling at Teresa, the boys must have picked her up along the way.

"What's this crap about, Teresa? Nice way to greet your long-lost buddies."

The bows swung their aims towards the muscled Asian boy who had spoken. He had black hair cropped close to his head and enormous, powerful arms and he looked closer to my age than Thomas or Teresa's. His expression and his voice were saturated with contempt, bordering on anger as he curled his lip at us. The Asian boy took a step closer, and I could suddenly see the boys who had been hidden behind him – Teresa opened her mouth to respond but-

"Lily!"

And then I saw him.

There was a moment of pure euphoria – of relief, of recognition, of understanding - he was tall, taller than I remembered and thinner too. His dark blonde hair had grown out past his shoulders rather than just flopping over his forehead and the same myriad of cuts and bruises that marred the others covered his skin too. But his voice; his voice was exactly the same. As his shout rang through the air, our eyes locked. His were dark now - the colour of the earth before the Earth went to hell – and wide with emotions I wasn't sure of, fixed on my face, staring at me with all the intensity I'm certain I was mirroring. He knows me? His eyes were older too than the boy in my head; his face, his whole body more tired than the boy I remembered. But he was N, and the whole situation - the knife in my hand, the mission, the Flare - seemed to melt out of my awareness because he was there. He was alive.

'Don't ya' see, Lilby? I've already told you?'

Yes.

Yes, of course you have.

He'd been telling me from the beginning. Laughter bubbled up in my chest, bizarre in the burning wind and the heat of the desert.

"Speak to her again and I'll shoot." Karly's voice was acidic behind me, tearing me out of my trance. It seemed to do the same to N – he looked surprised, almost like he hadn't realised he'd spoken aloud.

"Don't even think about it!" My own voice sounded strange and sharp. I took a breath and softened it. "Nobody else needs to get hurt."

The expressions of the boys changed at my words, some immediately looking defensive, some angry, some confused and others just looked frightened. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Teresa look between me and N and then send me a glare that said plainly 'shut up', probably with some expletives thrown in.

Teresa paced towards the boys again as the sun rose even higher. She stopped a couple of metres in front of N and the Asian boy. The other boy visibly bristled and N seemed to refocus, tensing and looking down at Teresa, confused:

"Teresa? What the bloody-'"

"Shut up." She spoke in the same cold, emotionless tone that Karly had. "And if any of you make a move, the bows start shooting."

Teresa lifted her spear again and paced between the frozen boys, searching their faces just like we'd planned, until she was standing in front of Thomas.

"Teresa." Her name was barely more than a whisper and the emotion Thomas gave those three syllables surprised me. This didn't look like somebody who wanted to hurt her. I wasn't sure he had it in him.

Teresa set her jaw and said nothing, just staring at him.

"Teresa, what's-"

"Shut up." He couldn't.

"But what-"

Faster than an arrow from a bow, Teresa flew backwards and swung the butt of her spear into Thomas' skull. What? That wasn't what we agreed. Some of the girls shared worried looks as Thomas crashed to the floor, his hands against his head, moaning. Horror and anger crossed N's face and he moved forwards, starting to reach out towards Thomas, and the Asian boy put up his fists, as if he could help from there, but Raven just moved her spear closer to them, shaking her head, and the boys reluctantly dropped their arms.

"I said shut up." Teresa's voice was empty but her eyes were shining. "Is your name Thomas?"

He wouldn't answer her at first, telling her she knew who he was, and she hit him again with the spear until you could see the welt rising on his skin, until he screamed:

"Yes! My name is Thomas!"

Having gained his admission, Teresa backed away from him through the crowd of boys, who instantly got out of her way, their eyes burning with a mixture of confusion and hatred. As she moved she told him:

"You're coming with us, Thomas. Come on. Remember, anyone tries something, the arrows fly."

On cue, every girl with a bow took a menacing step forwards, making all the boys take an identical step back, moving closer together under the influence of the sharpened steel. All except the Asian boy anyway:

"No way!" He shouted back. "You're not taking him anywhere."

As planned, nobody responded. We'd decided that communication wasn't allowed. It would make us seem too human. Teresa merely spoke the next line of the script, her eyes still locked on Thomas.

"This isn't some stupid game. I'm going to start counting. Every time I hit a multiple of five, we'll kill one of you with an arrow. We'll do it until Thomas is the only one left, then we'll take him anyway. It's up to you."

In the tunnels we'd agreed that was a bluff – if they still needed convincing, we'd shoot one in the leg or something – but, judging by the look on Teresa's face, I wasn't so sure she was bluffing anymore. The Asian boy looked like he was going to fight again, but N grabbed his forearm and held him in place, a frown creasing his forehead. Every couple of seconds, his eyes would flick to me, then Teresa, then the bowmen. Our eyes met again and I looked away. Be like stone. Don't react to them.

"One!"

Thomas moved immediately, not taking any chances, pushing through the friends who tried to catch hold of him, until he got out into the open, walking until his face was a couple of centimetres away from Teresa's.

"Fine. Take me."

"I only made it to one."

"Yeah. I'm really brave that way."

I think most of us there agreed, but Teresa couldn't let him speak like that – the group could try something. She slammed the spear into him, into his stomach this time, so hard that he rolled to the ground again and spat blood into the desert sand. Stop talking. Just stop talking and come with us.

"Bring the bag." Teresa ordered and Harriet and Sonya moved forwards with the burlap sack.

"We're taking him with us!" She continued. "If anybody follows, I'll hit him again and we'll start shooting you. We won't really bother aiming. Just let the arrows fly any old way they feel like."

After a few seconds, Harriet and Sonya had forced Thomas into the bag. He didn't struggle, but every time one of the other boys moved or shouted out, Teresa would hit him again until moans sounded from inside the sack. Stop! I wanted to shout at them - don't you see she won't stop?

It was only when Harriet and Fi picked up the end of the bag with his head in and lifted it off the ground, when Thomas realised what was about to happen, that he started to shout again. "Teresa! Don't do this to me!"

It wasn't a threat. It was a plea. She hit him again, with her fist rather than the spear and he screamed. I could see Charlie across the circle, somewhere behind Aris. Her lips were pressed together and hot tears were rolling down her face.

"Since you obviously don't care about yourself, talk again and we'll start shooting your friends. That sound good to you?"

All that came from the bag was a hollow sob of pain. The note I'd written didn't feel like madness anymore. Teresa knelt by the bag and whispered something in a harsh tone, then stood up and barked:

"Okay, let's get out of here. Make sure you hit as many rocks as you can along the way."

We dissolved the circle around the boys and made one around the bag instead, walking quickly towards the cover of the nearby hills, Harriet and Fi dragging Thomas behind them in the burlap sack. We just wanted it to be over.

My chest ached as we walked, both for the boy who was still sobbing in the bag on the floor and for the one I'd left behind, still holding the arm of his friend, fixing him to the spot. I knew what I was about to do. I just had to time it right.

The Asian boy was still screaming abuse at us as we walked – between names so inventive that I'm not sure how to spell them – something about 'finding us' when the 'time is right'. With my free hand, I'd managed to work the knot of my pendant loose and the lizard was cool in my palm. I flashed a quick glance at Teresa; she was still at the front and looking forwards, focusing on not reacting to the shouts from Group A. That was all I needed - my spear fell into the dust and I started sprinting back towards the group of boys.

I was about to break the only rule we'd decided on and I had seconds.

I could hear Karly and Raven and Teresa shouting behind me, but I blocked them out, the abuse from Group A getting louder and louder as I skidded to a stop about 15 metres in front of them, but I wasn't looking at them. I was looking at him. My hands were shaking as I fumbled with the lizard, pulling the note out of my pocket and wrapping it around the carving. Please be looking at me.

Before the boys could do anything, before they could move towards me, as revenge or a hostage or a bargaining chip, I looked straight at N - 'I've already told you'– and, with absolute certainty, cried:

"Newt!"

Taking aim, I flung the pendant with the strap wrapped around the note through the air and it sailed over the gap between us, faster than I expected. Newt – I knew it, I remembered – caught it and, without waiting to see what happened, I ran, ran back to the others, ran until my lungs ached, ran until I could only just catch the Asian boy's scathing words on the desert wind:

"That could have been a bomb, you total slinthead."

"Well, it's a bloody good thing it wasn't, isn't it?"

N –

I can't explain it, but I know you somehow.

If we meet again, I'll try to explain.

I'm sorry. I'll find you again.

We won't let her kill him.

Lily

Four Days Later – Heading for the Safe Haven

It sounds impossible, but we were still running. It was colder now than it had been and clouds had rolled in from the North, black and heavy. When we'd spoken to Thomas the day before, after we'd decided not to deliver him to Janson's 'designated Killzone', he'd told us about what happened to his group in the last electric storm. The thought of that only made us run faster – maybe we could get to safety before the storm broke.

It didn't help that we had no idea what we were running to; when we'd reached the end of the Pass a few days before, we knew the Safe Haven – or at least where it was marked on the map – had to lie somewhere in front of us, but the mountains fell away into miles and miles of dusty flat ground. There weren't even any plants, let alone anything that looked like a Safe Haven. Then again, since when had WICKED made anything easy? As Harriet said, by the time we got there, we'd still have a couple of hours to work it out before the deadline hit.

Running here, even though it was flat, was even harder than running in the mountains, where there was less sand and more protection from the wind that was ripping across the plain. We were almost leaning into the wind as we ran, at a 45 degree angle to the ground, trying to see through the fog of sand that the growing storm was throwing up.

Every few minutes, I found myself twisting around to make sure that the disappearing trio – Teresa, Thomas and Aris – were still making their way down the mountainside. Both Thomas and Teresa had been there when we'd eaten the night before, but somewhere along the walk to the campsite, we'd lost them – everyone had been too wrapped up in conversation or lost in their own thoughts that we hadn't noticed until we were almost at the bottom of the slope and had set up camp.

What to do next had divided the group – some shouted that Thomas and Teresa had never been part of our group and that Aris had made his own decision, that we should go on without them. Others thought we should go back and make sure Thomas was okay - we'd promised to protect him – and I couldn't pretend I didn't feel that way. Teresa, I didn't like – there was too much about her that didn't make sense, too many gray areas and emotions that seemed to contradict each other, but Thomas was nothing like the 'monster' she'd painted him as. Yes, he was an unimpressive fighter, but he was smart and seemingly more principled than a lot of the girls from our own group. He'd fallen into step with me as we walked the day before.

"So, Lily…" He looked a lot better when the threat of imminent murder wasn't hanging over his head. "How do you know Newt?"

I started a little. "Then that is his name…" I'd said it to myself but Thomas nodded.

"I don't really know. I had a lizard pendant when I came in here, with an N on the back. I guess I always knew it belonged to someone important – and I had a few really weird dreams. But it wasn't until yesterday-" I laughed shortly. "Ironically, it wasn't until yesterday, when I had a serrated knife pointing at his throat that I was certain he was real. That I hadn't just made him up to fill in the blanks, you know?"

Thomas' eyes drifted up the group to where Teresa was talking to Sara, tossing her spear from hand to hand. "Yeah." He said, a little sadly. "I know."

We walked for a few seconds in silence before Thomas suddenly said:

"He remembered you too, you know. Newt."

My stomach did that strange flip again. "How do you know?"

"Er, doubt you saw it yesterday, 'cause you were all too busy getting ready to shish-kebab my eyeballs, but he had a wristband on. Woke up in the Maze with it. It was leather with-"

" 'Lily' in black ink?"

Thomas' eyebrows shot up into his hairline. "How do you know?"

I flashed him a wry smile. "Like I said, weird dreams. How's your head?"

The place where Teresa had hit him had swelled up like an egg, black in the centre and purple round the edges. "Hurts like a mother."

He reached up and poked it gingerly with his fingertips. "I feel a bit like a prize guineapig with a huge rosette. Thanks for feeding me by the way."

When Teresa had tied him to a post, Karly and I had given him some cereal bars and water when Teresa's back was turned. I laughed again: "Don't mention it – the blueberry ones are disgusting anyway. Somebody had to eat them."

In a strange way, I'd realised that I liked Thomas. Even after being beaten up by someone he thought was a friend, dragged through a forest in a bag and tied to a post for seven hours, he was far more upbeat than I think I was that morning. So, that and what I'd promised Newt in the note I'd thrown at him meant that the idea of leaving Thomas in the mountains with a girl who'd promised to kill him didn't exactly sit right with me. The argument had reached a stalemate and rather than going anywhere, we'd decided to wait at the base of the mountain until we saw some sign of them - which took so long that as soon as they appeared over the mountain ridge, Harriet ordered us to start running.

We ran in silence, the wind that was getting up echoing in people's ears and the sand we were kicking up sticking to our skin. When we cleared the mountain range, Sonya caught sight of Group A coming around it, out of a cave entrance dug into the rocks we'd passed earlier. We were too far away to make out individual faces, but I was glad when I counted eleven - the same number that we'd met during the ambush. They looked tired, stumbling and running in bursts, but they seemed to be heading in the same direction - according to Thomas, Janson had told them to find the Safe Haven too.

After about two hours of moving as quickly as we could, Harriet eventually jogged to a stop and beckoned everybody around her.

"Okay girls. According to the map and the instructions from weasel guy, the Safe Haven or whatever leads to it should be around here somewhere. Everyone, eyes on the ground."

Everyone started shuffling across the desert sand, blinking furiously in the dust, looking for anything that could be the Safe Haven - a message, a tunnel entrance, a symbol, a monster - as Group A got closer and the clouds above us got more and more black. We kicked over stones, pulling at the remains of withering plants in the naive hope that a door would swing open somewhere. It didn't seem likely, but when you'd seen dead bodies vanish, skies turn off and killer slugs built like Swiss Army knives, hey, anything was possible.

As we shuffled, I found my thoughts drifting back to the boys. Janson had told us that the boys had taken the harder task in the Scorch. It had certainly showed - only eleven of fifty stumbled through the sand, some of them being virtually carried by others. It probably hadn't helped that the tunnels they'd just staggered out of had been marked in scarlet on the maps they clearly hadn't been given. I wondered what was in them. I wasn't sure the boys who had their arms wrapped around the shoulders of their friends would ever want to tell me. What do you want from us? I still didn't understand what WICKED were planning. 50 boys and 50 girls. 11 boys and thirty girls. What were we supposed to do? Were they seeing which group was fastest, like with the Maze? But that didn't make sense - we'd had different tasks this time. Did they want to weed out the best of each group? Maybe. But any ideas about what they'd do with the survivors then were too sick for me to think about for more than a few seconds. Maybe they won't do anything. Maybe we've served our purpose and they'll let us-

Amid the pebbles, the dead worms and plants, something fluttered on the edge of my vision. To the left of where we were running was a single stick in the ground, about knee height, with a thin orange ribbon attached that was whipping back and forth in the gusts. I knelt down next to it and caught hold of the ribbon, holding it still and in thin black lettering, stark against the orange background were the words:

THE SAFE HAVEN

My stomach dropped somewhere into my feet. What? Another riddle with a fatal time limit. We had an hour before Janson's deadline and we had a stick in the ground and a storm brewing. I hadn't realised the end of the world had allowed capitalism and its companies to play puppetmaster with the weather as well as the lives of children. By now, the others had spotted me and a crowd had formed behind the stick.

"Well, there it is." Mariella was trying to smile. "That's it, right? We just wait now?"

"No." Karly's frown and stone expression quickly shut down any hopes people had about the Trial being over. "That's too easy. When have we got anywhere and found 'we'll done, guys, you did it.' Last time we thought that, Rachel got stabbed. There's got to be something else."

Sonya sighed heavily. "But there's literally nothing else here."

"So we stay ready. And we wait." Harriet had just finished her sentence when a cry sounded from behind.

"Hey - girlie squad!" The Asian boy. Not the best start, if I'm honest. "Where's our guy?"

Having seen us stop, Group A had changed direction and caught up. Gosh, they looked worse than us. Their clothes were ripped and bloody and, now I was closer to the boy who had spoken - Thomas had called him Minho - I could see a gory collage of blisters all over his legs and arms, a keepsake from the electric storm.

"There!" Karly stepped towards him, her chin up - she was half a head shorter - and pointed back to where Thomas, Teresa and Aris were running across the plain, most of the way to us. "With your girl."

Minho scoffed. "Teresa? You can keep her, Barbie. Scheming witch. Now what're you ladies gawping at?"

What a prick. His manner wasn't getting him anywhere. Everyone was bristling and I saw people's fingers drifting to their knives. Then another voice came from the group of boys.

"Min. Give it a bloody rest, ya' know? They're shattered too - don't know about you but I'd like to keep my eyeballs."

Newt. He'd been at the back when Minho had first jogged up to us, and he had his arm around the waist of a smaller boy with sandy coloured hair and a seeping wound on his forehead. The boy had an arm wrapped around Newt's shoulder and he looked more than a little unsteady. Newt was looking around our group, clocking our sheathed weapons as he pushed his hair back from his face, and his dark brown eyes suddenly met mine. I felt that strange tug of recognition in my chest again and was about to speak when he coughed suddenly and quickly transferred his gaze to Karly, who was glaring daggers at him. As Newt moved to the front, I saw he was sporting a heavy limp, putting hardly any weight on his right ankle as he gave Karly a tight-lipped smile.

"Can we see, please?"

She looked him in the eyes for a few seconds, before making a 'humph' noise and stepping back, her arms still folded across her chest. "Alright. Get out of the way, guys."

"Thanks. You okay, Clint?"

The huddle around the flag parted a little and Minho, Newt and the boy he was helping made their way towards it, closely followed by the rest of their group. They said nothing for a couple of long minutes, going through the same myriad of emotions that we had. Eventually, Minho moved round to the back of the group again and threw himself down onto the floor, crossing his legs under him and leaning his head on his hand, looking about as deflated as possible.

"Well, shuck me, ladies and gents. Guess we're stuck with each other."

I was sitting in the dust between Karl and Charlie a couple of metres away from the Safe Haven stick. After Minho had sat down, everybody had and we'd explained the whole 'kidnap Thomas' situation and the man in the white suit and they'd told us what had happened to them in the fallen city we could see on the skyline and the nearby caves. To cut a long story short, they'd met far more Cranks than we had. But now that we'd done that and debated the stick for as long as we could (which wasn't very long), a definite divide had formed between the two groups, boys on the left girls on the right. Nobody was speaking across it - unless you count the black looks that Karly kept shooting Minho (she hadn't forgiven him for the 'Barbie' thing) - and the boys were still nervously glancing at the weapons that each girl had at her side.

"Lily?"

"Mmm?" Charlie was picking sand out of her nails, her face the picture of concentration?

"Are we staying with the boys now?"

"I don't know. I think so."

She thought for a second. "That's good, right? The more fighters the better?"

Unless they give us something worse. "Yeah. I'm pretty sure that's good."

There was certainly no deadweight left in Group A. All of them had well-defined muscles, and some of them were enormous, veins bulging out of their arms. Minho was sitting next to the boy with the gash, Clint, and nodding over to Sonya and Harriet, gesturing, and muttering something that made the other boys snigger. Oh for gods sake. I got that they were angry about the ambush, and that they were tired and beaten up and had been through hell but frankly so had we. None of us chose to be in this shitty situation, and yet here we all were. Together, it seemed. We didn't have the time or any expendable people to ignore each other like this. What's the point anymore? I took a deep breath and pushed myself up off the floor.

"What're you doing, Lil?" Karly had twisted round to look at me with a questioning expression.

"Just give me a second."

Before I could change my mind, I strode over to Group A, to where Newt was sitting next to a heavy-set boy with thick black hair, and tapped him on the shoulder. He turned and, on seeing me, jumped to his feet, stumbling a little.

"Hey!" He was a lot taller than me up close; the top of my head was about level with his jawline. His expression was tired - cautious - but about as warm as I could hope for.

"Hey. Sorry. Er...Newt, isn't it?"

He smiled then - not the lopsided grin that had played in my mind for the past few months, but a ghost of it, tugging at the corner of his lips. He nodded, rubbing the back of his neck. "Yeah, yeah. Lily, right?"

I nodded too, trying to smile back. "You were right the other day, you know."

He grimaced, flushing a little. "Ah. Sorry about that. Not all that sure what came over me."

There was an awkward moment where neither of us knew what to say. Talking to him later, I know he felt the same - it wasn't that there was nothing to say, but so much and so much that didn't make sense tangled between us that starting at all seemed too hard, so for a few seconds, we just looked at each other until Newt remembered something and his hand went to his pocket.

"Oh!" He scrabbled around and pulled out the lizard pendant, carefully balancing it in the palm of his hand and holding it out. "This is yours."

I took it and touched it gently, tracing the familiar lines with my fingertip before looking back at him. "Funnily enough, I think it's yours, actually. But thank you."

I unwrapped the leather from around it and held it back out to Newt. "Um, could you-"

"Oh - yeah, sure. Sure." He took the lizard back and gestured for me to turn around, before placing the strap around my neck with the lizard resting on my chest. "Like that?"

"Yep."

"Good that. Just let me-" Newt was fiddling with the knot on the end of the strap. "We've been moving for so bloody long, my hands are shakin' all over the place."

Newt's fingers brushed the back of my neck, cool against my skin as he tied the knot, and a strange shiver went down my spine, like the rest of me knew something that my mind didn't. Without thinking, I reached up and caught his hand in mine and he froze. Slowly and without letting go, I turned back to face him, not even noticing that every Glader in both groups was silent, watching us. Newt was staring at me too, his eyes wide, a frown creasing his forehead and I briefly wondered if the Flare was already worming its way into my brain, if I was already going crazy, when a smile flickered across his face and he squeezed my fingers and had pulled me forward before I even had time to process what was happening. I had to push up onto my toes to hug him properly, he was so tall, but he wrapped his arms around my back and I slid mine around his neck, both of us holding tight as if the other might suddenly blow away in the wind that was only getting louder as the storm built. As I held him, a total stranger in the middle of the Scorch, both of us filthy and battered beyond belief, a feeling of complete safety washed over me - which is insane considering the location - and I was suddenly convinced that this was the first thing in three years that had felt so unquestionably right. So normal. Like I'd done it a thousand times before. Like, despite our comically different dimensions, my body almost moved on autopilot to hug him back.

"It's so good to see you." Newt whispered in my ear, his words turning into a laugh. "I don't even know why, but I'm so bloody glad you're here."

When we eventually pulled apart, his eyes stayed fixed on me as I smiled, somehow laughing with him in this post-apocalyptic hellhole. "Yes.Yes, you too. Sticking hell. We've done that before."

Newt nodded. "That's just what I was thinkin'. I knew you, didn't I?"

I opened my mouth to answer him when a pointed cough came from the floor behind him. "If you guys are quite finished - what the everloving hell is going on?"

Ah. Now we'd stepped back, I could feel the shocked stares of all the other Gladers clustered around the flag and the way that the low murmur of sound that had been there a few seconds earlier had cut out completely. Newt came up with an answer faster than I did.

"Er, long story - I'll tell you later, man, okay?"

"If we get a later - shouldn't we be trying to work out what to do now we're shucked in the middle of the desert, Newt, rather than mixing with them?"

This annoyed me. Sick of Minho's stuck-up attitude, I stepped around Newt to be directly in his line of sight.

"Minho, just cut that out for a second. Don't you get that what we've got to do is obvious? Us, them, girls, boys, A, B, leaders, not leaders, it doesn't sticking matter anymore. Don't you see that?"

Minho just raised his eyebrows at me, but some of the others were nodding. Iona gave me a small smile and snuck over to offer one of our first aid packets to Clint. The dark haired boy handed Harriet one of their water bags. Finally. I sighed.

"Look, all I'm trying to say is, I think the part where we're enemies is over. The part where we're separated is over. So there's no point into splitting into petty camps like children, because whatever WICKED throw at us now, we've got to be ready to fight them. And together this time?"

It's almost a question. A rumble that sounded like a hundred barrels rolling across a cargo hold crashed through the skies above. Before Minho could answer, Newt did.

"Absolutely."


	26. Mornings, Meetings and the Michelin Man

**Chapter 26 - Mornings, Meetings and the Michelin Man**

**The WICKED Centre - The Next Day**

"BEEP, BEEP, BEEP, BEEP!"

I flew upright in bed, ripped out of the visions of underground tunnels with rabid animals, bulb monsters tearing the life from Yana, Fi, Orla, lightning bolts that blow craters into the skin of the dusty Earth below, incinerating anything unlucky enough to be nearby that my brain had constructed in deep sleep, by the alarm that blared from the clock on the bedside table. I wondered briefly - if we really had survived WICKED's twisted circus - whether I'd ever sleep properly again, without the ringmaster's phantoms playing in front of my eyes every time I closed them. The alarm had frightened all of the girls in WICKED's new dormitory, which was close enough to the one in the sham rescue centre that everyone was immediately awake, adrenaline flooding their bodies. Everyone was sitting up, some bleary-eyed, some with their gaze flicking between the window and the door, some girls already standing, their hands on the rucksacks that WICKED had let us keep, the fear that had dogged all of us for the last few months gradually retracting its claws.

Looking around the room, my heart racing, I couldn't help but feel the gaping holes in it, even though every bed was occupied. Fiona fighting next to me until suddenly she wasn't. Dinah lying in the sand, still struggling as the life bled out of her and the Berg rose higher in the sky, lightning bolts cracking around us. How could they let us do everything they asked, against all possible odds, and then let us die anyway? We knew from what had happened to Thomas in the ghost town that WICKED had the power to save any one of us, but like bitter gods rolling dice, chose to abandon us to die. To murder us. It made me so angry that my chest and my eyes burned as my vision suddenly swam with tears.

"Lily?" Karly's face appeared through the bars around my bed. "Did you see where I put my other shoe last night, baby?"

In some feat of gymnastics, she lifted her socked foot up onto the edge of my top bunk bed and wiggled it in a clockwise circle. Rubbing my eyes, I had to laugh.

"No, why would I have - oh, that one?"

There was a white sneaker hanging off the edge of the wardrobe handle by the door, a single stripy sock stuffed into it.

"Ooh, yes! Wonder how that happened..." She mused as she wandered away to retrieve it.

The night before was a blur for everyone - we'd half wanted to enjoy the showers, clean clothes and hot food that WICKED had given us, half wanted to collapse in a ball on the floor, and everyone had basically done that at different points, moving without speaking - sluggishly, like Blissed-out Cranks ourselves. I didn't even really remember getting into the bed I was crawling out of. Charlie was in the bed below me, slowly changing into the fresh clothes that had been laid out for us, her eyes still full of sleep.

I'd been horrified when I realised in that final attack that there was one bulb-monster for each of us - I didn't know how to protect her - but through the mass of limbs and shattering lights, I'd caught flashes of her as we fought. Charlie moved differently to the others, not attacking, slashing, but standing back, dodging - even running away - but the lights on her monster were gradually shattering, one by one as it got slower and slower until it finally crashed to the ground. It wasn't until we were collapsed on the loading bay of the WICKED Berg that I'd asked her how she'd done it. She was shaking then, the adrenaline effects finally kicking in, but, with trembling fingers, Charlie had pulled out a small mahogany, carved box that I'd seen a couple of times in the Weapons Room back in the Maze. She opened it, and cushioned in velvet were row after row of tiny sharpened blowdarts.

"They just burst them." She'd whispered, her eyes far away. "Like balloons."

Now, Charlie slipped out of her bed and wrapped her arms around my stomach, squeezing hard and mumbling, 'Morning' into my shoulder as the noise from the others rose as everyone gradually became aware of what was going on:

"More alarms? Isn't there a music setting?"

"What are they doing with us now?"

"We still have to get up at six?"

"Who moved my toothbrush? You better not have used it, Hannah..."

"Where did they put the boys last night?"

"Somewhere far away, I hope - that one guy wouldn't stop hitting on me. I was half asleep the whole time!"

I hugged Charlie back, smoothing her hair down from the tufts that had formed. "Morning, honey. You want breakfast?"

"Not really." There were tiny cuts all over her face from the shattering glass. They'd stitched a couple of them, harsh against her pale skin. "Is that where we're going?"

"Better be." Karly had returned, wearing both sneakers now. "I'm freakin' hungry."

I pulled a navy cable-knit sweater over my head and looked around the doorway. Some of the girls that had already dressed, and some boys, filing out of a room a few doors down from ours, were being pointed by people in WICKED uniforms to a high-ceilinged room at the end of the corridor with long tables in it.

"Looks like it." People were being handed knives and forks on entry and a low buzz of chatter was echoing off the coral wallpaper of the corridor. I grabbed my bag and stepped out of the dorm. "All I'm saying is there better not be any beef jerky."

The Canteen

There were rows and rows of tables, stretching all the way through the massive room with wall length windows and making us feel tiny and out of place amongst the leagues of empty chairs. There had to have been room for at least three hundred people in there, and the high ceiling dwarfed the thirty something Gladers huddled in the far corner. Most of the girls were still in the dormitory, and the ones that weren't had already filled a table on their own - there wasn't any room left for us - and it seemed a little weird to just hijack one of the boys' tables so, for a few seconds, Karly, Charlie and I just stood there in the doorway with our cutlery, taking in the scene.

"Oi, Queen Bs! You sitting down? Or do Amazons eat standing up now?"

Minho. He was sitting at the head of a half-empty table just in front of us with Newt and the dark-haired boy from the Scorch. The WICKED medics had patched him up, but with the number of blisters he'd gathered, both of his arms were covered with adhesive bandages that knit the skin - there was even one stretching up from his collarbone to his jaw - but it appeared his ego was undamaged.

"Usually." Karly was straight into sassy Captain of the Trackers mode. "It's a prehistoric ritual based on the days when we ate off of the skulls of men. But I guess we could lower ourselves."

She slid effortlessly into the seat next to the dark-haired boy, with a condescending smirk. Charlie and I exchanged an amused glance - looks like our seating decision's made - and followed her to the table of Group A boys. As we approached, Newt smiled at us and tilted his head to the spaces to his right. I took the seat next to him with an answering smile, but Charlie stayed standing, not sure if his invitation extended to her.

"You too, baby." This time, it was the big dark-haired boy who had spoken. Charlie's lips twitched into a nervous smile and she nodded, sitting down by me and reaching for the cereal packets lined up in the centre of the table.

"Wow." I said. I couldn't remember the last time I'd eaten something out of a branded packet. "They're spoiling us today."

Newt laughed. "That's what I said! Took me a second to even get the bloody milk thingy open."

The dark-haired boy shook his head, an expression of mock disapproval on his face. "That's what you get for never stepping in the Glade kitchen, Newton. Too busy bossing to learn the basics, goddammnit."

This time it was Minho who laughed. "Bossing? Sorry, did you see him when he had to be leader? Never seen any shank more horrified about playing king for the day."

"Alright, alright." Newt ran his fingers through his too-long hair, accepting the jibe. "But, hey, 'least I wasn't threatenin' to smash guys in the balls to keep control, yeah, Fry?"

Both boys deliberately spun their gazes to Minho and I before I could ask what on earth had gone down there, Charlie's voice came from my other side as she caught something else that Newt had said.

"Fry?" She was looking at the other boy, presuming that was him.

"Oh!" He smiled at her again. "Guess I keep forgetting that sounds weird to you guys. My name's Siggy, if you wanna be official, but these shanks've always called me Frypan, 'cause I was Keeper of the Cooks in the Maze, yeah?"

She nodded. "What's your name, little lady?"

"Charlie." She answered, brushing her wispy hair out of her face to make sure he was paying attention. "And I'm not that little."

I grinned at her. That's my girl. She gave me a tiny, proud nod and Newt was nodding too, leaning forward to talk around me.

"Damn straight! I saw you last night with those darts, ya' know - that was bloody genius."

"Not really." Charlie was blushing now, her gaze suddenly fixed on the tea she was pouring. "I was panicking. It just worked."

"Yeah, well, my panicking was falling over and hopin' I could hit something on the way down, so you were buggin' miles ahead of all of us guys, Charlie. Nice one."

Minho was nodding, and I was glad to see that his seemingly rampant egocentricity didn't go all the way to his core. "He's right, kid. That was sweet. Although -"

I was getting ready to retract my previous thought as he deliberately sat up straighter and flexed a bandaged bicep. "If you'd given me one of those jagged spears, I would've given you girls a real show."

And there it is. Newt and Frypan groaned as Karly raised her eyebrows and replied:

"That's rich, coming from the Michelin man."

Newt spat the sip of orange juice he'd just taken across his cereal and Frypan started laughing so hard that the table shook.

I tried to smile sympathetically at Minho, but I was spluttering too. "Walked right into that one, Superman."

As Newt dabbed at his shirt with a napkin, I caught sight of the leather wristband on his right arm. It was a couple of centimetres wide, the metal of the clasp rusted, just like in my dream. And just like in my dream, and like Thomas had told me, the letters of my name stood out, black against the faded leather. I looked back up at Newt's face - his square jaw, the smile that seemed to pull from one side of his mouth - and wondered for the millionth time: who were you? What were we?

I'd thought that as soon as I was with N, everything about him would make sense, but I was wrong. If anything, everything about him just added up to one immensely confusing thing that made my brain hurt. And it wasn't like the universe gave me that much time to work it out.

After breakfast, we were all hustled by pristine WICKED employees into yet another huge space labelled 'The Common Room' filled with beanbags and couches shaped like Tetris pieces. The same group of us sat clustered in a circle on the beanbags, along with Clint, a smaller guy with a strong Irish accent. Apart from us, the two groups seemed to have mostly formed their own clans, but our conversation flowed easily, this time turning to what Janson had told both groups before the Scorch Trials had begun.

"I just don't get it." Clint said, burrowed into an olive beanbag. "They told us we had the Flare, right?"

"Everybody did." Minho answered. "Rat Man, that Crank couple running in the desert, Jorge, Brenda, those nutbags in the Ghost Town."

"But they promised us a cure." I said. That was what didn't make sense - we'd been given fresh clothes, food, medical attention with some of the most high-tech kit around, but at no point had anyone said anything about a cure for the disease we'd been told would turn us into something worse than animals. Was this just another of WICKED's tricks? Trust nothing and no-one. Least of all yourselves. "Why wasn't that the first thing they gave us?"

"Ach, I don't know. Maybe we never had it - maybe it's just one of WICKED's shuck mind games?" Clint's face was hopeful.

"If it's airborne, I guess we've gotta have it by now - those crazies in the caves were spitting in our faces." Frypan muttered, miserably.

I could see the torn and broken frames of the Cranks in the tunnels, their faces scratched, their movements stilted and wild - as if the puppet master moving their bruised bodies had passed them to his apprentice instead. A wave of nausea swept through me.

"Sometimes I think I can feel it, you know?" Newt was sitting on a black beanbag, his voice quiet as he leaned back against a nearby sofa. "Like something itching in your head, just where you can't buggin' reach it. Or like, you'll be looking at something and it'll move and then you blink and it's nothin'? Got it or not, they're driving me crazy."

He gave a weak laugh. I hadn't noticed either of the things Newt had said and I didn't answer - though if I heard them today, that would be the last thing I'd do - but, at his words, I could suddenly feel things burning and crawling under my skin with ghostly feet and shivered. Frypan nodded, frowning.

"Ugh, I know, man. Like scratching, yeah?"

Newt wrinkled his nose a little as Clint and Charlie started nodding, the phantom bugs crawling over their skulls too.

"Sort of. I'm not even sure I ain't imagining it."

Karly hadn't said anything for a while - she looked a little pale - and jumped in to change the subject as soon as the boys left a gap.

"So, where's your friend, boys? Thomas?"

All of the boys' faces darkened with confusion. I hadn't seen Thomas yet that morning but I hadn't seen a lot of people - Aris, Raven, Sonya - I hadn't realised that there was anything wrong with Thomas not being around, but Clint was shaking his head as he answered Karly.

"That's the thing - we don't know. He was with us last night in the Berg; we all saw his showdown with the WICKED guy - David or whatever - and he was in the big room with everyone 'cause I remember seeing him with Teresa and wondering what the shuck he was doing-"

Minho snorted. "I'll second the hell out of that!"

"- but he wasn't in the dorms when we woke up this morning. Or at least not in ours, right, Newt?"

That was strange. But then again, from our mission in the Scorch and what he'd told us about his bullet wound in the Ghost Town, it seemed like Thomas was either WICKED's Golden Boy or their Most Wanted. They hadn't been treating him like the rest of us for a while. Maybe he'd levelled up above us peasants. Maybe they had him in a prison. Newt nodded at Clint.

"Yeah. Bloody weird - he was right there last night. I'll ask someone soon as they come in." Newt shifted around (which is harder than it sounds on a beanbag) to face Karly, Charlie and I, a smile back on his face. "Thanks for looking after him out there, by the way. He's smart as anythin' when he wants but he's got a brain like a sieve."

"And the shank fights like a noodle." Minho was grinning now too, but both boys struggled to mask their worry behind the smiles they'd pasted on.

A loud crash sounded from the other side of the room, where Sara had knocked a trash can off a nearby table where she and a boy named Jackson had turned cushions into basketballs and the nearest sofa into a shooting 'D' for an impromptu game. Laughter and a round of applause went up from the Gladers scattered around the room and I suddenly wondered what would happen to us. Not right now. Not in the next five minutes, but ever. Would we escape, find homes? Would we stay together? Or would we all disperse into what was left of the world? Get married, have kids, grow old and tell our grandchildren stories around fires with cocoa?

In some ways, I'd like to show the girl - that version of me - who sat curled up on a turquoise beanbag surrounded by people she loved in ways she didn't even remember what my life looks like now. The home I've made on this scarred planet. I think she'd cry. Then maybe she'd laugh. I hope she'd be proud. But on that day, almost three years ago, my reality now was nothing more than a blank future that might not even have been mine to decide.

"Do you think this is really it?" I mused aloud. "The end?"

"It freaking better be." Karly said, her expression suddenly sad. "I can't do that again. I can't sticking watch anybody else do that again."

"Yeah." Minho was looking at Karly, his expression focused. "I mean, what else can they do to us? Drown us? That's about the only element they haven't screwed us over with yet."

"Ugh, don't even say that, man." Newt laughed humourlessly. "They're bloody psychos, I'm pretty sure they can think of somethin' else."

"What would you do?" I almost cut him off, twisting again to look up at him. Even sitting down, he was a good few inches taller than me.

"What?"

"If this was it. If someone came through those doors now-" I pointed at the frosted glass panels at the far end of the room. "And told us we could leave. What would you do?"

Newt opened his mouth to answer and then closed it, considering. He was silent for a few seconds, looking out of the nearby bay window at the dusty grass and the cement courtyard where a few WICKED operatives were wandering around with clipboards.

"I think...I think I'd go somewhere I could do something. There's got to be so many places only a little less screwed up than the Scorch, places where people need help. 'Cause that's the worst thing about being in here, ya know? That was the worst thing about the Maze - nothing ya' did made any bloody difference, it didn't mean anything. All we are are pixels in a blueprint and numbers on a clipboard and I'm so buggin' sick of that crap. I want to do something that means something. I want my life to mean something."

He took a deep breath and let it out again. "So, yeah. I think I'd go somewhere I could help and then, when I was done there, maybe get as far away as possible from all these companies and their corporate bullshit and just live for a while. I don't know."

Now he'd finished, Newt looked a bit embarrassed, particularly when nobody spoke, just taking in the raw truth of what he'd said.

"Well, shuck me, Newt." Minho was smirking, an eyebrow raised. "I was gonna say I'd find a real taco truck and then get a Berg the hell outta here. Isn't Aris supposed to be Aristotle?"

"Oi..." Newt leaned across Karly and shoved Minho's shoulder so that he lost his balance and toppled into Frypan who promptly shoved him straight back onto Karly, who pushed him again until he threw himself forward and rolled into the beanbag at my feet, yelling: "Hey, hey, get off, you dumb shucks!"

We were all laughing so much that we didn't notice the glass doors sliding open until AD Janson's voice echoed around the room.

"Your attention, please, Subjects!"

As much as we all loathed the man, you couldn't help but be impressed by the way that a single sentence could command total silence from a group of thirty teenagers. Janson was absolutely immaculate, once again, if a little paler than the last time he'd appeared before us - the white suit was pristine, as if it had been pressed less than five minutes before. Couldn't he make the same impact in a more forgiving colour? It must be so annoying to wash.

He didn't come any further into the room than that, a few feet away from the glass of the doors and a good ten metres away from the closest Glader, a guy called Mike. Janson was holding a clipboard and he gave a shuddering cough before beginning to speak.

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. I hope you're all feeling well this morning-"

"We'd feel better if you'd tell us what's happening already." Minho barked. Janson just shot him a disapproving glare.

'We've discussed your interruptions before, Mr Park. You will get the information much more quickly if you remain silent - this is a very brief announcement. Now, I'd like to congratulate all of you on your completion of the Scorch Trials. You have done extraordinarily well - but now is not the time to dwell on the past."

Ignoring the scoffs that sounded at that comment, Janson turned to the first page of his clipboard. "As you all know, before your participation in either of the Trial projects, you lived here for a number of years together. During those years, you underwent a series of tests to determine your mental state and your physical fitness. We had hoped that the Trials would provide us with enough information that further testing would not be necessary, but this proved in vain - do not concern yourselves, there will be no more Trials."

Janson's expression was almost fierce as he spat out the last few words. Oh dear, I thought, I hope you're not too disappointed.

"What there will be, however, are some final tests, similar to - albeit less extreme than - those you took when you were younger that you will take over the next few weeks in this facility. These tests will in no way affect your treatment at WICKED or your treatment when this testing is over, they are purely for scientific purposes on a very basic level. You will have the rest of this morning for recreation, and after lunch, we will begin testing. I'm glad to tell you that I don't even need to wish you luck in these exercises. Have a good morning, ladies and gentlemen."

With that, Janson spun on his heel to leave - nobody was having that. Rather than the dramatic exit he'd clearly been aiming for, what he got was an aural bombardment:

"What do you mean 'tasks?"

"Where the hell's Thomas, Rat Man?"

"Didn't you say all that shit last time?"

"When are we going to get the Cure?"

"Yeah, what about the Flare?"

That stopped him. Janson didn't turn around immediately, rubbing his eyes with the heels of his hands and sighing heavily and taking a deep breath. When he finally spun, he was wearing his customary irritated expression.

"Do not concern yourselves about the Flare, ladies and gentlemen. You will receive the Cure in due course, when we have calculated a time for release - long before any damage is done. We are certain of that. In terms of Thomas, it seems the Flare was far more deeply rooted in him than we feared initially. Its...violent effects mean that it would be far too dangerous to have him amongst the rest of you. I encourage you all to forget him as soon as possible."

And he was gone.

You would expect, after a speech like that, for conversation and arguments to erupt and crash over the room, but after everything we'd done, I don't think any of the Gladers sitting there had the strength. Everyone sat in stunned, accepting silence. But Thomas? He had sat with us, fought with us, collapsed with us in the Berg after the storm - how was he suddenly violent, after a single day? It didn't add up. And how could they be certain of what the Flare would do? Wasn't that the one thing they'd told us about it - that it could never be predicted? As usual, WICKED had answered one question and spawned fifty.

Eventually, when the seconds stretched into minutes, some of the WICKED operatives started to mill around between us, our behaviour not fitting into their plans. "Come on kids, that's enough now." They hassled until people started to stand up, drifting through the facility, back to rooms or across to bookshelves or to the table soccer stations, and as I got up to follow Karly back to the doors, I felt a tap on my shoulder.

Newt was standing too - his worry for Thomas was even more clear now, the shadow of that not leaving his face even when he smiled, but he tilted his head - follow me - and took my hand, pulling me behind him as he weaved through the Gladers before slowing to a stop at a green table with a net and two bats.

"Ping pong?" I raised my eyebrows at him.

"Yeah - you any good, Lilybird?" He held out the yellow bat like a duelling sword.

"I have no idea, I don't remember! But-" I took it with my fingertips and spun it like a baton, "-challenge accepted, Newton."

I crouched down by the side of the table to pull the ping pong balls out of the tube attached to one of the legs, when a word he'd used snagged on something in my memory, tugging in the same way Timmy's 'Birdie' had.

"Wait, what did you just call me?" I straightened and Newt frowned, going back through his words, then blushed.

"Er...Lilybird, I think? Not sure why - it just felt right. Sorry."

"No! No...it felt right for me too." I smiled at him. "Not sure why."

Newt sighed before picking up the orange ball I'd placed on the table and sending it lazily across the net. "See this is it, this is what I wanted to talk about."

I sent it back at an angle and it just tapped into Newt's court before flying into the nearest beanbag. "Agh!" He growled and spun to get it. "One nil. But I was thinkin', we need to talk. I know we don't remember much until these shanks decide to fix whatever they did to jack up our brains, but there's something weird going on with the two of us, dontcha think?"

Newt tapped the ball over my side of the net and I dived to hit it, answering as I did:

"Definitely - I mean, you're wearing a wristband with my name on it, buster."

He laughed and glanced at his wrist. "That is a bit of a buggin' giveaway. And your necklace - it's a lizard?"

"Yep. Could even be a newt. There's an 'N' on it...which I guess you saw?"

Newt tried the feather-light approach again, just dropping the ball on my side and this time I missed it. "Haha, yes! Yeah, as soon as we stopped that day, I spent a stupid amount of time lookin' at the thing. Seeing if anything sprung from my memory blocks."

"Did it?"

"No. I just felt that I'd seen it before, that it was right familiar. But your note-"

I missed a shot again and the ball clattered into the glass of the vending machine. "Steady on, Lil, you're bloody givin' 'em away now. Your note - you said you knew me. Was that the lizard? Or was it me shouting like an idiot?"

"No. It wasn't...it wasn't really either." I tossed the ball from hand to hand, trying to put the words in an order that would make any kind of sense. "I didn't know you. Not for ages. I've had that lizard for years - since the day I woke up in the Glade, maybe even longer than that - and I didn't know it had anything to do with you specifically, I just knew whoever 'N' was was important and I didn't want anything to happen to it-"

"Yes!" He broke in. "That's exactly how it was with the wristband! I didn't know who you were, but I didn't want anybody else guessin'." He ran his fingers through his hair with a sheepish smile. "Sorry, carry on."

Tossing the ball onto the table, I slammed it across to his side, making him jump and miss, the ball flying over his bat. I grinned. "Now, who's giving them away? No, but that's not how I knew you - I couldn't have picked you out on an initial back in the Scorch, or even if I had remembered your name."

I stopped, remembering how strangely the girls in the Glade had treated me for a while after I told them, how I'd put the Trackers in danger for nothing and I almost didn't tell him. For a while, only the tiny orange ping pong ball went between us as we volleyed, clicking off our bats every few seconds.

"It was - something strange happened to me a couple of months before we escaped the Maze. I was out by our lake-"

"You guys had a lake? We had a pipe in the Bloodhouse."

"It was basically a glorified puddle with a bit of pond life - if you swam in it, you'd probably be sick for a week. But I was sitting by the lake anyway, waiting for the Trackers to come back in, and I just collapsed. I was a Medic, so I know what dehydration, overwork, colds and stuff feel like and it wasn't anything like that. I felt this pain in the back of my head, like burning needles, or something, and then I blacked out. When I was out, I...saw things. Heard voices."

"Like what?" Newt's face was concerned as he returned my shot.

"Like...I saw somebody out in the Maze. They were lying in the dust just off the Central Corridor. They were hurt, I think, rolling around and holding their leg - it looked broken. It was horrible...they were crying."

I felt my something twist in my chest again at the memory. Oh, don't. Please don't cry.

"I heard voices too - WICKED workers probably, talking about the person, I think. Saying stuff about Variables and something about A5 and Keepers, I'm not sure. I woke up and went kind of crazy - it all felt so real - and I sent the Trackers out to lap the Walls and did a headcount, but there was nobody there. It was all in my head, but it was so horrible. Later that night, I was looking at my lizard again and I suddenly saw you. Remembered you. Not anything about you, or even what you look like now - you were younger in my head, so it must have been a memory. All I had was your face and this weird certainty that you were N, and that this was your lizard once."

"Hang on a second." Newt had caught the ball rather than sending it back and he was frowning, as if counting back through the weeks himself. "When did you say all that was?"

"Um, about a month before we all got out."

"What time of day?"

I didn't know why it was suddenly so important. "I'm not sure exactly - it was before the Trackers came back, so about half five, maybe?"

Newt nodded, but he wasn't looking at me, the frown still on his face and his eyes distant, like there was a memory of his own playing somewhere I couldn't see.

"N?"

His gaze returned to me. Without speaking, Newt put down the bat and slotted the ping pong ball back into the table and turned to me, his expression wondering.

"Can I show you somethin', Lily?"

When I nodded, Newt moved across to the nearest sofa and sat down, motioning for me to do the same. Then he reached down, rolling the leg of his jeans up to his knee and I gasped. A web of recently healed scars stretched all the way up his right calf, some thin, some jagged, at least a centimetre thick, pink and white in patches - some even overlapped with the shallow cuts of the last few weeks in the Scorch. I remembered the heavy limp that I'd noticed at the Safe Haven.

"Newt..."

"And here, look."

He brushed his dark blond hair to one side, pointing at the tattoo on the back of his neck. All of the girls had woken up with one in the first day of the Scorch, though we hadn't noticed until that night, but I hadn't thought to ask the boys about theirs. Newt turned away from me slightly so I could read his.

Property of WICKED. Group A, Subject A5. The Glue.

A5.

Newt was A5.

His leg, patterned with scars. I ran a finger across the the black letters staining his skin.

"That was you." My voice was almost a whisper as Newt turned back to me. "In the Maze. In my dream. Newt..."

"It was my ankle, mostly. But yeah." He nodded. "Not one of my best days if I'm honest."

"Are-" I stopped myself. Don't ask him that, you idiot.

"What?"

"No. That was about to be the stupidest question ever."

Newt grinned, leaning closer, determined now. "What? Tell me. I'll answer your stupid question, Lilybird."

"I was going to ask if you were okay. But I watched it. Obviously you weren't."

"No." He leant back against the headrest, stretching an arm across the back of the sofa. "I wasn't. I'm pretty sure that was the worst pain I've ever been in, even before this memory stuff. And I mean-"

Newt exhaled in a forced laugh. "It was pretty bloody embarrassing too. I was Keeper of the Runners for two years. The team at the centre of everything was my team. I was the fastest Runner, the fastest thinker - I had to be. But then I had that accident just a few metres out from the Glade."

Accident?

"I forgot where I was going, took a wrong turn and ended up in a corridor where some of the Wall collapsed and a ton of ivy had grown over it. I took it too fast and went flying. Minho and Alby -" A shadow crossed his face. "- my friend - only just got me back before the Doors closed. But I couldn't run. For weeks, I couldn't even walk. Minho took over as Keeper of the Runners and I became a sort of jack of all trades who couldn't really do any job properly, so I did what needed doing and made sure everyone else was doing it too."

I was confused. Newt was the person I'd seen that day, that much seemed certain, and it added up in every way except one. In my dream, there hadn't been an accident. That person had climbed up the Walls until the ivy stopped and then jumped. There was no accident. But how could I know who was telling the truth? However well I knew him once, we were virtual strangers now - and, even if you know somebody better than you know yourself, how can you ask them whether they wanted to die? If he'd wanted me to know that then he wouldn't have told me what he did.

"Stuff like that breaks more than just your body, you know?"

For the first time in this place, Newt had abandoned his nice guy persona, the guy who kept the others going and he looked desperately sad - there was almost something lost about his eyes. In that second, I didn't care that I barely knew him. I reached across the sofa and slipped my hand into his. Newt just held it for a while, and I rubbed my thumb in circles across the back of his hand and murmured:

"I'm sorry, N."

When he eventually did look over at me, the sheepish look was back.

"No! Thank you. I'm sorry. Didn't mean to offload all of that klunk - I just wanted to explain... but I blacked out too that day. Before they found me. It sounds like it was the same buggin' thing. I saw things - a lake. A person lying by it. Are ya' B5, by any chance?"

I swivelled in my seat to show him my own tattoo. Property of WICKED. Group B, Subject B5. The Incentive.

"That's what I heard them saying. Something about your implant."

I'd completely forgotten about those. "Yes! Well, that would make sense - if both of our implants got damaged in whatever happened, then that could explain our memories coming back. So when you fell and damaged yours, something broke in mine?"

Newt nodded. "Sounds like somethin' like that. When I woke up, I could see your face too. But I wasn't sure I hadn't made you up - or my mother of all concussions hadn't. That's why I lost my mind a little when I saw ya' out there in the Scorch. Guess I'd been thinking 'bout you a bit like a unicorn, ya know?"

I spluttered with laughter. "What? No, I don't know!"

He waved his free hand around, trying to get the words together, grinning. "Like something that was nice to believe in, but probably not real. Kinda magic."

"I'll take kinda magic." I squeezed his hand again. "I'm real though. 'Far as I know."

Newt smiled. "What's that piece of klunk saying they keep tellin' us? Trust nothing and no-one? Just promise not kill me in my sleep, okay?"

"Nah. I'll just kill you at ping pong instead."

"What?!" He snorted. "Please. Did you keep score then?"

"No. But let's just assume I was winning."

"I was bloody owning you. But okay, fine. What memories have ya' had back? 'Cause I've had a lot come back in dreams, but I'm not sure how much work my imagination's been putting in."

This was yet another moment when I wasn't sure how much to tell him. Because some of the things I remembered... I decided to test the waters.

"I remember sitting on a red sofa with you. In front of a bay window."

His eyes lit up. "Was it dark outside the window? With lights in the distance?"

"Yes! We were wearing pyjamas and your ankle was bandaged."

"Starting as I mean to go on." Newt grimaced. "That one was real then. My turn. I remember sitting on top of a climbing wall, you were sliding and I-"

"You pulled me up? Yes. I couldn't reach, the poles were going back into the walls."

"Right, real, yeah? Your go."

"I remember a train. An old one, full of people shouting - Mariella, Karly, Minho. You're sitting in front of me at first, talking about something."

"Was Alby with me?"

"A dark-skinned guy with a shaved head? Tall and kind of muscled?"

"That's him. 'Cause I remember sitting in that train with you, looking out of another window. It's still dark and we're the only ones awake, but you could see the WICKED complex out of the window."

"I've seen that. I don't think we'd known each other long."

"No." He looked hard at my face, studying it. "You're a lot younger in that one. Thirteen, fourteen maybe?"

"Gosh, is that how long we've been here?"

He sighed. "Don't know. I reckon I'm about nineteen now. You too, even though you're so tiny."

"Four years...at least. Anyway, my turn. I dreamt the other day about some kind of dance - a homecoming, maybe? There were lights everywhere - it looked a lot like the room we had breakfast in actually. We'd both dressed up; I was wearing a navy tea dress and you were in a suit. Do you have that one?"

"Were we dancing? Together, I mean?"

"Yes - you carried me, I think."

Of all the strange memory-dreams I'd had about Newt, that had been one of my favourites. The high-ceilinged room had been patterned with swirling lights, like shifting stars and the music playing had been soft and slow. I hadn't told him exactly what I'd remembered about dancing with him. Standing on his feet with my head on his chest, hearing his heart beat through his shirt. Just thinking about that made my head hurt. That didn't seem like the kind of thing casual acquaintances did - or even that friends did. Then again, neither did the wristband or the pendant we wore. But if he doesn't remember that, then I look crazy.

"Yeah, I remember that too. You kept fallin' over things, so I carried you. My turn?"

For some reason, Newt looked slightly hesitant as I asked. "Do you have another one?"

I did. But I wasn't going to say it first. He nodded, his eyes on the tiny holes that speckled the ceiling of the Common Room rather than me.

"Well there's a lot of little things - just a couple of seconds. You smiling. You with Karly. You in a forest. You in my dorm. Both of us in combat. You reading to the smaller kids. But yeah. I remember being on a roof. It's dark again - did we only ever speak at night? - and there's more stars than you can count."

"Fireworks." I said quietly, wondering if his dream played as far as mine had.

"Yeah." Newt's voice was lower now too. When he looked across at me, a blush covered his cheeks again. "And...oh, bloody hell, I'm just going to say it. In my dream, we kissed on that roof. Feel free to tell me where to go if I made that up."

So he does remember. "I don't think you did...I dreamt that too, N."

His hand was still in mine and I couldn't remember the last time I'd been that aware of somebody. I think both of us felt a strange sense of intense possibility that day, as if there was a whole world waiting outside, as if we were never going to be alone in it, while simultaneously being totally trapped by WICKED's walls and rules and the games they were playing with our heads. What if none of this was real? In the end, I don't think it would've mattered to Newt or I if that had been true.

Newt laughed softly after a couple of awkward seconds. "Well. Then. True, I guess?"

"Seems like it."

"You know no-one else calls me that? N?"

"Oh. I always have in my head."

"No, I like it. Don't stop."

"Okay."

A cheer came from outside and we both looked up. A soccer game was going on outside - I could see Clint, Mariella, Jackson, Raven and, to my surprise, Charlie laughing with a boy that Newt called Leo. She's a kid. We all were. This is what we should have been doing. When Newt's voice came from behind me, he'd clearly been thinking the same thing. "Ratman said we all grew up together. Do you think we ever used to do that?"

I smirked up at him. "If we did, I'd have won."

"Not against Min. He's bloody brilliant. But definitely against me, I was bloody awful at soccer, even before I jacked up my leg."

We laughed and Charlie turned around, catching sight of the two of us in the window and waving maniacally, pointing at the ball. Newt and I both waved back, giving her the thumbs up.

"She's adorable." He said. "And badass."

I sighed, watching her catch a header from Leo as he groaned with frustration. "She's perfect. Nothing makes me hate WICKED more than Charlie."

"We'll get her out. Don't worry about it, Lilby."

Another nickname. But that wasn't what made me turn around to face him. "We?"

Newt didn't hesitate. "Yeah. 'Course. It's funny - I remember you, Lily. So there's that. But it's more than memory. It's not only a thought, ya know? It's a feeling too."

I'd spun away from the windowsill, leaning against it. Newt was just a few centimetres in front of me, looking down and not avoiding my eyes anymore. He smelled like vanilla and the lavender soap we'd been given that morning and his eyes weren't dark brown now, but russet, the light of the room catching on copper specks in his irises.

"Bloody hell, that sounds stupid. I mean - I - I feel things with you, like right now, that I don't think I could feel with someone I've only just met. I wouldn't tell someone I'd only just met all of that stuff. But it sort of feels like I've told you all that before, even though I can't have done? Do ya' see?"

I knew exactly what he meant. I'd hugged him in the middle of an apocalyptic wasteland, remembered him when everything else was a blank. He was somehow a stranger that I'd known for longer than I could remember, in the plainest sense of the phrase.

"I see." I pushed myself off the windowsill, suddenly conscious that there should probably be more than five centimetres between us, but I reached up and rested a hand on his shoulder anyway as I moved back. "It's kind of both - I remember memories, but I remember feelings too. But...whatever we're doing in this place now, N, we're doing together. My squad and yours."

Newt moved away from the window too, pulling open the nearest door so we could go and join the soccer crowd. Before he swung the door open for me to go through, he caught my eye one more time, the crooked grin I'd seen so many times in my head finally on his face.

"Good that, Lilybird."


	27. Difficulties, Drugs and Mysterious Deliveries

**Chapter 27 - Difficulties, Drugs and Mysterious Deliveries**

**WICKED's Tasks**

**PHYSICAL**

"Okay, I'm done. I might actually throw up." Jackson threw himself on the floor with a dramatic sigh, his curly auburn hair sticking to his face and one of the enormous bricks we were hauling resting on his chest. "Ooh, now I can't move, what a shame."

WICKED had split us into groups of four that afternoon, given us a series of different sized stones to build a shelter with at the opposite end of the exercise hall we were in - with precisely no instructions, as usual. The only problem was the enormous obstacle course that lay between us and the opposite side of the hall, complete with pits, tunnels, climbing walls and water jets that had already soaked most of us to the skin. Frypan was unimpressed, flashing Jax an exasperated expression.

"Dude, you were a Builder."

"Eh." Jackson wrinkled his nose. "I was more of an architect."

I looked across at the adjacent lane. Teresa was shouting at Aris, tossing an L-shaped brick at him as he ran to scale the rope ladder. Their shelter was already half built. Teresa and Aris had become strange figures at WICKED over the last few days - we didn't dislike them exactly, and after everything that had happened in the Scorch, after everyone we'd left there, none of us were stupid to create another 'them' and 'us', but we were all aware that they knew more than us, that they were special in some way. They knew it too and had stuck together, slightly separate from the rest of us. I looked back at our semi-standing shelter, at the course and the group of us buckling under the weight of the stones and I had a thought.

"Guys? They didn't say anything about us all doing the course, did they? They just said we had to have a standing shelter?"

"No?" Frypan wasn't following. I elaborated.

"What if we don't all run across all of here, what if we spread out across the hall? Use our strengths?"

"Yes!" Mariella got it and practically bounced towards Jackson, pushing the block off his chest and pulling him to his feet. "Jax - you just said, you're the architect. Get over to the shelter and collect the bricks from us. You build the shelter and Frypan, Lil and I can spread out over the course!"

When he didn't move immediately she pushed him between the shoulder blades in the right direction. "Go, go, go!"

Jackson laughed and took off. "On it, Queen B!"

Ella spun to me. "I'll take the water bit, Lil, you take the middle with the ropes and Fry, you stand here and run with them to Lily, okay?"

Within five minutes, our production line had rattled to life. As I slid down to the other side of the rope wall and threw the next block to Mariella, I saw a WICKED worker nod approvingly and scribble something on her clipboard.

I felt my lips curve up into a smile, despite the sweat and the water and the way my arms were burning, both from the exertion and burns from the ropes.

We all had this now.

PROBLEM SOLVING

5 DAYS LATER

Mazes. They had to be kidding.

Two dots were blinking on the screen in front of Karly and I as we swiped the walls of the electronic labyrinth around, trying to find a path in less than the designated number of squares before our characters ran out of 'Glucose':

"Left - no, wait! Lil, two rights then a left."

"Do we have enough Glucose to jump that trap?"

"Ooh, no, but if we take a right here, then..."

A sound like a bell dinging once came from the machine and the screen morphed into 'Maze 47' with a different pattern, more traps and less Glucose. As you went along, things like vines, covered traps, winds and shifting walls appeared in the game, making it progressively more difficult and progressively more frustrating, as Minho was finding out.

"No, shuckface - I told you, that doesn't work!"

Minho's eyebrows had been drawing closer and closer together as the task had gone on and now they were practically merging with annoyance.

Newt wrinkled his nose. "Dude, that was your-"

"Whatever, watch out for that hyena."

"Got it."

That morning, Karly and I were working opposite the two boys randomly thanks to WICKED's selection equations, but this was pretty much how we'd spent most of our free time recently - sometimes with Charlie or Clint or Harriet or Jackson, but always the four of us. I'd got used to Minho over the week or so we'd been there. On the surface he was definitely a cocky jerk that I'd normally avoid at all costs, but under all of his testosterone-fuelled blustering, there was actually a fairly normal human being with an iron will and a sparkling sense of humour.

Our screen shifted again and this time, there were hairy ape-like things with wicked fangs swinging between the vines on the wall that you had to waste Glucose wrestling to get the exit key.

"Hey Minho!" Karly's eyes never left her screen as she smirked. "Look at these things - you didn't tell me you were starring in Level 49!"

He didn't bat an eyelid. "Why, cause you can't live without me?"

Newt and I shared a smile and a roll of the eyes over the flickering screens. Despite our newfound friendship, Karly and Minho had become duelling partners lately, Newt and I their unwilling seconds. I'd got used to him too, I suppose. The way that his hair fell into his eyes and drove him mad, but he hated tying it back, the way he laughed, like he'd forgotten how to breathe. The way he let Minho make fun of him because ignoring him was a better game, the way he'd picked up a guitar in the Common Room and been stunned that he remembered how to play it. The way that the more time I spent time with him - with all of them, together - the easier it became and the more I wanted to stay.

SCIENCE

THE NEXT DAY

#601 - FLARE WITH BLISS EFFECT

The moving brain scan pinned to the table in front of me was blacker than anything I'd ever seen. The normal brain on my right was awash with electric colour, sparks flying in all of the major areas of the brain in waves, like a town at night. Scan #31 - ADVANCED (NOT 'GONE') FLARE EFFECT - was similar, in patches. Some areas of it were so dark that you could barely make them out on the scan - the same areas that were technicolor on the normal scan - but other areas were like someone had taken that scan and turned up the brightness as far as the dial allowed and then kept going, a city that never sleeps.

This one meanwhile - the Bliss one - as the dose increased, got darker and darker, until the brain was almost indistinguishable from the black of the paper it was projected onto. Some areas glowed dully, fading and flickering every couple of seconds while others just stayed dark. I remembered what Timmy had told us on the bus - the Bliss wasn't a Cure, or anything close. From the scan in front of me, it looked like it shut the brain down so far that the Flare couldn't progress, but neither could almost anything else. I wondered vaguely, as I scribbled the notes that WICKED wanted on the brains, whether the Bliss would kill you on its own if you took it for long enough. Maybe the people taking it stopped caring.

Suddenly, the Bliss brain slid off the desk in front of me by a black-uniformed WICKED employee and another one took its place.

"Think carefully about this one, Lilianne."

I looked up in confusion - for one thing, nobody had spoken to us during this task, the WICKED operatives maintaining their icy facade, and for another, I could swear I'd heard that voice before - but I was too slow. The woman who'd switched my scans was turning away, walking to the opposite end of the room, but not before I'd caught a glimpse of her blonde hair and the violet bead in her nose. Julie? But whoever it was, had gone.

I turned my attention to the scan. It was Scan #991 - FLARE WITH ELPIS EFFECT and an unusual symbol followed the numbers, like a lightning bolt. By this time, I'd studied Flare scans with a lot of drugs. Most of them did very little, at the most pushing the effects of the disease down for a couple of seconds (weeks, maybe, in real time) before it erupted past it, blacking out huge sections of the brain and blazing up others until it looked just like the map on my left. It didn't exactly make you hopeful.

But this one was different. Rather than starting at the base of the brain and wrestling with the Flare for dominance, this drug flooded the whole brain, subtly changing the colour of the brain on the scan, but particularly in the aggression centre - the Killzone - ignoring the disease completely. Gradually - the timer on the screen was clocking up weeks - so gradually, you wouldn't notice on a stationary scan, the blazing lights of the aggression centre that the Flare had sent into overdrive started to dull, reducing in intensity until they had the same technicolor flicker of the normal scan. The areas of the brain that had been completely dark started to waver into action - not shining as brightly as the normal brain, but nothing like the Flare one.

I waited, my pen still on the notes pad, waiting for the Flare to roar back to life as it had with every other drug. But all that happened was more lights shone in the blackened areas. What? This drug was reversing the effects of the Flare! There didn't even seem to be that much damage.

"Clint!" I hissed across to the Irish boy who was scribbling at the next station. "Have you seen this one? The Elpis one?"

He glanced up and frowned. "Elpis? No. Why?"

"Has Sonya? Or Leo?"

Clint passed the message down, but all I got back were shaking heads and blank faces. Has nobody else seen this one?

"Why?" Clint asked again.

"It's really weird. It seems to almost-"

A hand clamped down on my shoulder. Another WICKED worker was standing behind me. I'd never seen him before, but his face was stern, his expression just as intense as Timmy's had been on the bus. "Eyes on your own work, Miss Pasteur."

I mumbled an apology and picked up my pen. He gave me a nod and, as he did, the light caught on the pin badge on his breast pocket - the same jagged symbol that had followed the numbers on the scan.

COMBAT

"Shucking hell, Pasteur!" Minho yelped and fell backwards, knees pulled up to his chest to protect the unfortunate target of my last kick. "You can't disable me with a kick in the pants, you filthy cheat!"

"Sorry!" I ducked his left swing as he jumped to his feet, not without a grimace and a stumble that I should have taken advantage of. "I'm so tired - I was aiming higher, I swear!"

"Sure you were." Minho muttered bitterly before aiming a kick at my left side that I rolled to avoid. "Not as bad as Karl, anyway."

Kick, block, swing, duck.

"She was definitely going for my eyeballs."

We were doing a sort of Round Robin combat and this was the last fight, hence both Min and I being generally rubbish at it. I'd fought Clint, Newt, Henry, Aris and Jackson already and lost to Henry, a Track-Hoe built like a tree and a gleeful Aris who took my advice and knocked me over and rolled to pin my chest. Clearly Minho had already fought Karly. I ran behind him to try to knock him forwards but he anticipated it and spun, trying and failing to catch my wrists.

"Nope." I answered, finally landing a kick on his rib cage that made him stagger backwards. "If she was doing that, you wouldn't have any eyeballs."

Minho made a dismissive noise and pointed at the egg-shaped welt already rising on the side of his head. "Gave me this though. Hurts like a mother."

"Nice."

I was sneaking looks at Minho as we circled each other. He looked tired and the way he was stumbling at some of my moves wasn't like him. We'd all been carrying out tasks of almost any kind you can think of all week, but a couple of people had been called in for individual interviews that Janson had called 'Phase 3'. Minho had been called in a couple of days before. When he returned five hours later, he had a deep cut above his left ear and the eye next to it was turning purple. He didn't speak for the whole evening, not even to Newt, and he still hadn't spoken about whatever had happened to him in that interview room. The next day, he'd been back to his usual self - flirting with Karly, messing with Newt - but that didn't mean we weren't all watching him.

"Still." He tried to kick my legs out from under me and missed, but he still landed a kick to my thigh that sent a spike of pain through my whole leg. "I think she's kinda into me. Playing hard to get and all that klunk."

I wasn't completely sure that he was wrong, but no way was I letting him know that. Let him carry on drooling over Karl as long as she wanted.

"Min, there's playing hard to get and - agh-" I had to roll to avoid his next kick and my shoulder was definitely going to bruise. When I'd regained my feet, I pointed at his head. "Then there's trying to kill you."

Min looked across the gym to where Karly was sparring with Henry, blocking his swings with her forearm. Her hair was sticking to her neck but her face was grim with determination.

"Nah." Minho grinned. "She's freaking incredible, though."

"Yep." He was still looking at Karl. Excellent. I ran forward and kicked his ankles at the same time as I planted an elbow between his shoulders. He gave a yell of annoyance as I pinned him down and a ping sounded from the wristbands we were both wearing to signal that the fight was over.

"Now I get why they didn't put girls in your Glade!"

A Few Days Later - Girls Dorm - 8pm

How many teenage girls can you fit in a dormitory bunk bed? The answer varies, but at that moment there were six of us curled up in Karly's bed, attracted by the promise of gossip.

"So?" Sonya was sitting at the other end of the bed, her legs under the blanket. "What happened, Karly?"

"Yeah!" Harriet had swung herself up next to Sonya, burrowing into the blankets. "Spill the beans, girl!"

"Agh!" Karly laughed and covered her face with her hands. "Give me a second, guys."

The hot topic of the afternoon had been that Leo had stumbled in on Karly and Minho kissing by the water machine yesterday, and despite being immediately sworn to secrecy, only told Charlie, who only told Sonya, who only told Clint, who only told everybody - in a place like this, full of thirty teenagers with no real lives, secrets like that spread like wildfire. I'd already heard the basics from Karl last night and had definitely seen it coming, but that hadn't stopped me from clambering into bed along with the others, leaning against Karly, my legs tangling with hers in the cramped space.

"Did he kiss you?" Raven asked, leaning forward, her eyebrows raised.

Charlie, whose head was on my shoulder, made a tiny noise of disgust. "Isn't that weird, Karl?"

That made Karly look up and laugh. "Why would it be weird, honey?"

Charlie sighed, her brow furrowed. "I just don't see why you'd ever want to put your lips on somebody else's lips and think 'ooh, this is fun' - isn't that really slippy and gross?"

Now everybody laughed as Karly just shook her head, her eyes shining with amusement. "No! I mean, I suppose it could be, but it wasn't. It was kind of nice."

A chorus of 'ooooh' went up from everyone squashed into the tiny bed and Karly - Karly - actually blushed. I laughed along with the others, but my thoughts were somewhere years before, on a roof under the stars. Was that 'nice'? I didn't remember.

"Did he make the move then?" Harriet pulled Karly's hands away from her face again. "Don't leave us hanging like that!"

"Yes! I mean, I don't know!" Karly was smiling in a way I'd never seen her smile before. "We were just talking, and then it got really warm in the Common Room, so we went out to get some water. We were talking about the Trials and all the stuff we'd like to do if we ever get out of here, and then we were kissing, I don't know!"

"Was he a good kisser? He looks like he'd be a good kisser..."Raven grinned.

"Ugh, no. Way too much sass going on there - he's a bit up his own ass, don't you think?" Sonya didn't look as impressed.

"Yeah, but his arms -" Raven argued.

Charlie made a gagging noise and Karly was looking increasingly embarrassed. "Guys!"

She raised her hands in front of her in mock surrender. "Yeah - I mean, yeah, he is up himself but he's a lot of other things too. And yeah, he is a freaking good kisser - not that I remember anything else, but it was nice, I guess. I could feel all the muscles in his arms and-"

A knock sounded from the open door and everyone spun around. Newt was standing in the doorway, scarlet with embarrassment and wearing a slightly awkward smile. He coughed and his accent was more pronounced than usual.

"Er, evenin', ladies. I'm not tryin' to interrupt or anythin', but do ya' mind if I borrow Lil?"

He was rubbing the back of his neck, another sure sign he was uncomfortable, so I quickly clambered over the tangle of arms and legs in the bed and slid down the ladder to the floor of the dormitory.

"No problem." I smiled and followed him out into the corridor as Karly shouted after us:

"As long as you bring her back, Newton!"

When we got out of the dorm, I looked up at Newt and asked. "How long had you been standing there?"

He met my eyes, his own widening with mock-horror as he shook his head. "Too long."

We both laughed. The coral corridors of WICKED's main building turned into the metal of the outer shell corridors as we walked, the slight breeze that always came in through the windows there brushing the loose strands of my hair back from my face.

"What was it you wanted me for?" I asked as Newt ground to a halt outside the enormous bolted door that led to Level 5's balcony. They didn't have balconies on the floors below 5 - too many wandering Cranks that might be able to reach. He was fiddling with the rusty clasp on the third bolt as he craned his neck around to answer me.

"I saw something out here a minute ago. Seemed bloody weird."

The bolt finally gave and the door grated open and a blast of warm air hit us as we stepped out onto the balcony. It was after dinner, so the balcony was deserted, most people holed up in their various dorms and offices - but that wasn't what I was looking at.

"There." Newt pointed over the balcony rail to something by one of the WICKED outbuildings. I stepped up and leant over the metal bar to get a better look.

Outside one of the enormous barn-like structures that connected to the main WICKED centre with thin metal corridors, were three big transportation trucks with tens of black -overalled workers milling around them, like hornets around a honeypot. The back doors of the trucks were open, forming ramps to the ground and workers were dragging what looked like pieces of machinery on wheels down them and across to the main building, one after the other after the other. The machines seemed to be made up of a series of spindles with what looked like some kind of steel headsets attached to one side and a large computer touchscreen on the other. There was a man in a black suit standing by the main doors with a clipboard, ticking off every invention that passed through, talking into a earpiece and waving his arms at the workers.

The machines didn't look like any of the monsters we'd fought. Didn't look like anything we could fight, and maybe that was the most terrifying part of the spectacle. Whatever those machines induced looked like something that was going to be inflicted, rather than something we could get out of. It felt like something out of 'Alien' or 'The Matrix' (why do I remember those?) and a cold feeling settled in my stomach, counteracting the effect of the warm breeze and making me shiver. I had no doubt the contraptions were intended for us and one look at Newt's face told me he thought the same.

"The bastards said this was the end." Newt's voice was quiet but he looked angry rather than frightened.

"Maybe it's just another Task?" My voice didn't sound convincing, even to me.

"Maybe."

One thing that that I never tired of hearing at the WICKED compound was the sound of the birds in the nearby forest and the trees scattered around the base. For all of our animals, WICKED hadn't programmed birds into the Maze and there wasn't even any grass in the Scorch forget animals that had a choice about being there. All the birds there must have flown long ago. Tonight you could hear the soft wittering of nightingales and the calling of an owl somewhere in the trees off to our left, echoing off the concrete buildings. It was nice to remember that we weren't the only things left in the world.

"Do you think they've got Thomas somewhere down there, Lil?" Newt's eyes were fixed on the growth of outbuildings and the workers buzzing around them.

It had been almost two weeks now and Thomas still hadn't appeared. Janson wouldn't give us any more information and it wasn't only his friends that were worried now. There hadn't been any mention of a Cure for the disease that had supposedly turned Thomas into a raging madman and nobody was sure who might be next.

"Maybe." When had that become the answer to everything in our lives? "But this place is huge."

Newt didn't say anything. I moved a little closer and rocked into him with my shoulder. "He could still be okay, you know. They're working on a Cure all the time and they've saved him before, right?"

"But nothing's working, is it? None of the drugs in our Task did a damn thing. That's the real reason they haven't given us anything. They haven't got a bloody Cure. Why else would they still be testing us?"

He'd finally voiced the thing that had been squatting in the back of everyone's mind for almost two weeks, scratching away at our consciousnesses. There wasn't a Cure. And if there wasn't, weren't we all in as much danger as everyone outside this scientific prison? But his words called back something I hadn't yet asked him.

"None of them? Didn't you have the one called Elpis?"

Newt's brow furrowed as he turned to me, leaning on his elbow on the rail. "What? No. What was that one?"

"I'm not completely sure." I thought about the woman who looked like Julie, the stern face of the second man when I spoke to Clint, the lightning symbol. "I'm not even sure I'm supposed to be telling anyone. The last drug they gave me was called Elpis and the scans... it did seem to scale back the Flare. All the electricity and stuff, it seemed to reduce it in all the places where it had gone into overdrive. There was some damage, but it seemed limited. Not that I'm an expert."

He was still frowning. "I haven't heard anyone talking about that one. But that's good, right? For a mental disease?"

It's incredible really that, even after four years, we hadn't stopped hoping that the best would happen somehow.

"That's what I thought - so maybe they really have got something to work with. They could still help Thomas." And all of us.

Newt's expression was grim, like he could hope, but not quite believe. He laughed, but it was empty. "Hell, maybe he doesn't even have the bloody thing. Wouldn't be the first time they've lied."

He wasn't wrong. We watched in silence as the huge trucks shut their doors and rattled out of the compound, beeping as soot and exhaust fumes seeped out of the pipes. Somewhere the coo of an owl answered the first one.

"Do you ever feel like there's no point, Lily?" Newt asked suddenly.

"What?" My gaze snapped back to him. He was looking at the horizon and the outline of a single city visible on it, jagged buildings scraping the skyline and he was twisting his fingers around each other.

"Like we don't mean anything. Nobody out there-" He gestured out to the city, where a few lights were flickering on as the sunset turned to twilight. "-even knows we exist. People died in the Maze. People died in the Scorch. Our friends. Kids, for God's sake. And for what? They're not even close to a bloody Cure. Don't you ever feel like there's no point? That they're just going to torture all of these kids until something breaks, them, us and it still won't mean a shucking thing. That we might as we'll just..."

Newt's voice was thick and, when I stole a look at his face, all of his muscles were pulled tight, his eyes dark with fury. As he spoke, I could feel a pressure building in my chest, forcing tears into my eyes. I couldn't think about that. If I did, I wouldn't be able to stand. And I didn't believe it. WICKED had become monsters by that time, almost everything they were doing was incurably wrong, but even now I don't believe what N said that night. In the core of who he was, I'm not sure that he did.

But those words were Newt's shell finally cracking. They were a teenager finally just screaming into a void to see what would happen. Even though I couldn't remember then what he'd been through as a child, even though he couldn't, I was aware on some plane that this was the other side of the Group A's upbeat Second-In-Command. And I had to tell him. I didn't want to. But the void needed to answer him.

"N?" I reached out and took his elbow, turning him to face me. It took a couple of seconds for his gaze to focus. "I have got an answer. But can I ask you something first?"

"Sure." He looked wary.

I took a deep breath, but I made sure I was looking at him. "When I saw what happened to you in the Maze, when we collapsed - I - I didn't tell you everything I saw."

He knew what I was going to say before I said it. "I didn't just see you injured. I saw the accident... and it - it didn't look that much like an accident."

Immediately, Newt pulled back from me and covered his face with his hands.

"I'm sorry. I should have told you I knew."

He groaned softly, a long, drawn-out sound and rubbed his eyes with the heels of his hands. The first few words he said were almost lost in a sigh. "Right. Yeah...yeah."

Newt sat down suddenly, crossing his legs under him. I followed suit, saying nothing. Waiting. Eventually, he dropped his hands, but he didn't look at me, looking at the floor instead.

"It wasn't. An accident, I mean. I'm sorry I ever told you it was."

He tilted his head back and sighed again, and as he did, some tears escaped from the corner of his eyes and slid down to his jaw. I saw Newt cry only three times when I was nineteen. That was the first time, and, as strange as it might seem in hindsight, it was just as horrible as every other time. Newt wiped the errant tears away with the back of his hand.

"Agh, bloody hell. It was stupid. Really buggin' stupid. I knew that the second I let go...it's funny how that works. But I just couldn't deal with that place anymore. After two and a half years, I knew every inch of that Maze. I knew every Wall, every turn, every crack in the stonework. There was nothing there. Every day I got up and I led those guys out into Maze, knowing it was pointless, knowing that we wouldn't find everything and every day, I'd come back to all those people hopin' for a miracle and I'd have to tell them that there was nothing. Again and again and again, for two years."

I remembered one day in the Maze a couple of months before, where Karly had come back, drawn up Map #900 and then cried and cried while I held her. There was something about being a Tracker, or a Runner, whatever you called it, that was more intense than anything else that happened in the Glade. Without another option, the expectation of everybody else fell on you. It must have been unbelievably lonely - running for hours and hours on end with only your thoughts for company.

Newt rubbed the bridge of his nose with a fingertip. "I wouldn't do it now. I wouldn't. I think there were only a couple of hours where I'd really have done it then. But that was enough, I guess...I'm sorry I made up all that stuff, Lil. I just - it was just easier to lie."

I shuffled a bit closer to him on the balcony floor and looked up at him. "That's okay. I get why you did - you don't really know me and that's never going to be something you just say - but you could have told me. I would have understood. I do understand."

The first owl cooed again, closer this time and the second owl answered almost immediately, their conversation soaring over the concrete centre as Newt glanced across at me.

"I know. I guess, after all that time thinkin' about ya', in the Maze and in the Scorch, I didn't want you to think I was weak. That I was a coward."

"A coward?" I shook my head as quickly as possible. "After all of WICKED's crap? No way! Being lost, being scared - that doesn't make you a coward. Screw the dictionary."

That won a flicker of a smile.

"I'm serious! And if it does, then we're all cowards! I lived it too, N, I know how it felt - not being out in the Maze, but everything else. And we all thought about doing that. Every one of us who'd been there from the start thought about that. You were just on your own enough to actually try it. You're not either of those things - hell, the sheer fact that you're alive makes you one of the bravest people I know."

After a couple of seconds, he said softly:

"Thank you."'

"Thank you back." I reached out and squeezed his shoulder. There was still one more thing I wanted to tell him. "Can I answer your question now?"

Newt looked confused, then his expression suddenly cleared. "Huh? Oh, that one. Go ahead, Lilybird."

I looked out across the compound that stretched out before us, more than a mile wide, imagining all of the candidates, all of our friends, curled up in their dorms or crashed out in the Common Room and said:

"I think there is a point. I think, as long as some of us are left, there's always going to be a point. Because WICKED can do what they want with us - they can take our freedom, control our lives, maybe even control our bodies, but they can't take away the fact that we're never going to be alone. Not really."

Newt had long since stopped avoiding my gaze and was openly watching me.

"Because every one of the kids in there matters to me. You, Karly, Minho, Charlie, Clint, Frypan, Harriet, Sonya, all of you. And however screwed up it gets in here, however cheesy it sounds, you always will. Even if we've only ever got that - this belief in each other - then we've got something. Every one of us has thirty other people behind us. That's a whole lot. You can fit a lot inside a human."

He really did laugh then, the sound echoing off the glass panels below the balcony rail. "You make it sound like a rucksack!"

'Well, maybe it is! Look at all of us, hauling all this hope and love and friendship and determination and stuff around all the time. You need a soul rucksack."

Newt was smiling now, shaking his head at me. "You're a bloody marvel."

"No, I'm deadly serious." I tried to keep a straight face but I couldn't help but smile back. "Oh, just come here."

I, very gracefully, shuffled forwards on my knees and pulled Newt into a hug. He held me tight and I rested my head on his shoulder for a while, just feeling his chest move as he breathed in and out. Suddenly he laughed and started squeezing, moving his arms around my rib cage and almost lifting me up off the floor of the balcony, squeezing me until I laughed.

"Agh - can't breathe!" I pulled back a little, gasping with laughter. Newt just grinned and said again:

"Thank you...what would you do?"

"What?"

"You asked me that the other day. What would you do if we could get out of here right now?"

He'd shifted so that his arm was around my shoulders and I leant back into him, thinking.

"I'd want to help too. Make sure that nothing like this place is happening anywhere else. Find a way to sort this whole mess that doesn't involve mind control or mazes or monsters-"

"On your own?"

"No, silly. With my thirty people and a soul rucksack. Obviously." Newt gave me a wry smile and I carried on. "I'd get Charlie a guinea pig, 'cause she's always wanted one. As close to a pink one as you can get. Take her somewhere safe."

A whirring sound drifted across the stillness of the compound as red lights flew over us - a Berg on an evening patrol.

"And once I'd done all that, I'd learn to fly one of those. That'd be cool."

Newt suddenly nodded vigorously, and I could feel the vibrations of his voice against my rib cage as he spoke. "See, I was thinking this the other day. Ratman and his cronies keep acting all high and mighty, sayin' they've given us an education and all. And yeah, so I can tie a fisherman knot, raise barnyard animals, wrestle people to the ground and build shelters in 7 1/2 minutes, but when am I ever going to use any of that? Unless I'm a farmer in a place where there's one buggin' town every hundred miles."

"Or a 17th century peasant."

"Exactly."

I hadn't really thought about the things I'd like to do. It's difficult when you can't even remember the things you can do. "I'd like to roller skate. I'd be terrible. But I'd like to learn."

"I'd like to watch." Newt teased. "Or film. Why, though?"

"'Cause everything we've learnt is so practical, such survival mode stuff. I'd like to learn something practically useless. So, I could never roller skate out of a life-or-death situation, but hey, it might feel like flying for a while."

"I like that."

"Your turn then."

He wrinkled his nose, looking up at the moon that was starting to rise. "Carryin' on your impractical theme...I'd like to be able to play an instrument that's really weird, really well. Like an okarina or a harmonica or something. Can you imagine: 'oh, what instrument do you play?' and pulling an okarina out of your pocket?"

I laughed. "Okay, themes. What animal would you like to meet most?"

"What animal? Er...a sloth. Impulse answer. Maybe because I relate to 'em, ya' know? Arms and legs too bloody long so they don't walk right and hair that gets in their eyes. You?"

"As many dogs as possible. Every type, I'm not fussy."

"Good answer. If you could meet anyone, dead or alive?"

"Oscar Wilde. I don't even know how I remember them, but his books show you humanity. Or Tolkien. Ooh, or Mary Shelley. She's amazing."

"Stop cheating." But he was smiling. "I'd like to meet Henry Fox, ya' know, that aerial performer? I read his book the other day. Or Julie Andrews. She'd be lovely and terrifying at the same time."

"Would you have dogs or cats?" Newt pulled a face at my question.

"Dogs. Cats are good, but that's not even a buggin' question."

"And that's the only answer. Your turn?"

"Okay. If you could go anywhere, right now, where would you go?"

That seemed like a surreal question as we sat in a concrete compound in surroundings that were completely simulated. I thought about it.

"Somewhere where there are real trees that don't repeat every ten metres. Places where you could just sit and watch people and animals that are real, without having to worry about my reaction being recorded for science. Somewhere with flowers, maybe."

Newt just nodded. "I think England still has some places like that. I reckon that's where I'm from - I'll have to take ya' someday."

Three years later, I'm still waiting on that offer. But it was lovely to think about. "That'd be nice. Failing that I'd just go somewhere really cold! There's still a bit of the Arctic left, with some animals on it, right? Even if it's just one big iceberg, I'd go there."

"I'd go with you."

It was funny - we'd invented this as a game, making up things to fill time, to fill our heads with possibilities that weren't horrific ones, but the more the game went on, the more I found myself wanting to make it reality.

"Do you think we'll ever get to do all of that, N?"

Newt looked at me for a couple of seconds and, rather than saying a thing, took my hands in his and jumped to his feet, pulling me with him. He pulled me forward until we were both leaning on the railing of the balcony, looking out across the countryside, beyond the confines of the compound, to the cities that flickered in the distance, before answering:

"There's a whole buggin' world out there, see? So, yeah, 'course we will." All of his black thoughts from half an hour ago gone, and a faraway look on his face before he looked back and his lips curved into his usual trademark grin. "I'll make sure of it."

The moon had risen now, casting shifting patterns of shadows across his face. The clouds above us had changed from wispy to deep and rolling, spreading out across the sky until the stars couldn't quite break through. The air was warm, like it always was now, and we were so close that I could feel Newt's breath move my hair as he stood behind me.

"Newt?" I craned my neck around slightly to see his face, and I could feel my heart beating in my chest.

"Mmm?"

"Can I kiss you?"

I often wonder what would have happened if I'd never asked him that. What might never have happened. Newt started at the question, his eyes wider than they had been a second before. He shifted slightly, moving round to my right and, with a voice slightly more unsteady, replied:

"Wow...yeah. Okay."

I don't know what possessed me to ask the question, considering I had no idea how to kiss him, theoretically. But it didn't seem to require that much theory in the end. I pushed up onto my toes, resting one hand on Newt's shoulder and he moved forwards, brushing my hair back from my face.

As our lips finally met, I just had time to wonder if that night on the roof had felt like this, this warmth that made me shiver somehow, when a searing pain shot through my head, excruciating, as if something was burning inside my skull, sending me staggering backwards. Colours and lights were dancing behind my eyelids, some of them moving into pictures, moments that I'd never seen before, some stayed blinding lights, waxing and waning in time with the pain. I couldn't even hear the sounds of the evening on the balcony - the birds or the whir of Bergs passing overhead; the only sound filling my ears was a quiet murmuring almost drowned out by the dull humming that got increasingly louder.

Eventually, the noise and the colours receded as my vision returned in patches: the sky, then the railings - above me now, as I was sitting on the floor of the balcony, the echo of the pain bruising in the back of my skull.

Newt was sitting about a metre in front of me, one hand on the side of his head and frowning with his eyes screwed shut. He opened them slowly, blinking to clear his own vision.

"What the bloody hell was that?"

"I have no idea." I scooted across the balcony to him, not at all sure about standing up. "Are you okay?"

"Yeah..." He rubbed his eyes and nodded. "Yeah, are you?"

"Yeah." I'd just remembered something. "N...did that feel anything like that time in the Maze to you? When we collapsed?"

"Yes, actually. It came from the same place in my head. Just hurt a whole lot more. Do you think it's our implants?"

"It could be. Think about how much our implants did to our heads when we were in totally different places - we just put them as close together as possible with them still in our brains. It's got to be that - some kind of feedback maybe."

Newt was frowning again, resting his chin in his hand. "Did that happen with Min and Karly?"

"I don't think so. She'd have said something."

Newt chucked. "Min wouldn't. Would've damaged his street cred. Weird though..."

We watched from the floor as even more lights came on in the compound above us - probably the Common Room stragglers finally making their way upstairs.

"Lily?" There was a smile in his voice. I looked across at him and raised an eyebrow.

"What?"

"Do you wanna try that again?"

"Are you crazy? That was really sticking painful, N."

Newt shook his head. "No...I'm just thinkin' maybe it wouldn't do that twice."

I sighed, like this was a huge inconvenience, and moved closer again.

He was right. It didn't.

That kiss felt just like it had in the Scorch when he'd suddenly hugged me. Safe. Secure - even though there was no reason for us to feel either of those things. As we sat there, my arms around his neck, his around my back, my head spun with things I hadn't yet dreamed about: the two of us spinning in a forest, shouting in a library, jumping from ring to ring in a gym somewhere, playing games at a party, me tying the lizard around his neck - did I give it to him in the first place? - us by a swimming pool carrying children who couldn't have been older than six, reading in a dorm room somewhere, hugging in the clothes we'd worn in the Maze...

When we pulled back, both of our heads were spinning so much (and not for the cheesy-butterflies reason that romance novels usually give) that neither of us said anything at first, just filing away all the memories that had sprung to life and holding onto the feeling of the other person. It was N that spoke first.

"Wow."

"Yep. You were right."

He laughed quietly. "Yeah, sort of. Kinda hope that doesn't happen every buggin' time though. I can't focus on anythin'."

I liked that he said that as if there were going to be other times. "Every time? A little presumptuous, huh, Newton?"

Newt smiled and leaned forward to kiss me again, his lips just brushing mine. "I don't think so. And look, the implants didn't freak then, did they?"

This definitely hadn't happened with Karly and Minho. I thought about what I'd heard the WICKED workers saying about our circuits in the Maze. "Did we just break something, N?"

"If we did, then good. Let's keep doing that."

The lights went off in the corridor next to the balcony. That meant the last few people had gone upstairs. I whispered, "We should probably go up..."

"Mmm."

We didn't move. Instead we just watched, me leaning back against him, as the blanket of cloud shifted across the sky, revealing just a few stars at a time before they winked out again. When we eventually dragged ourselves to our feet to go back in, the only lights were in the bedrooms and the highest offices. Newt suddenly reached out and brushed my hair off the back of my neck, tracing my tattoo with his fingertips. His voice was soft as he read the title.

"The Incentive, huh?"

"Apparently. I'm not sure who's incentive. Or what I'm in the incentive for."

"Well, I don't know who WICKED are thinking. But you're definitely mine."

And he was my incentive, too - in everything that happened after that. I just wish he'd been there to see it all.

We made our way back through the corridors quietly, not sure whether WICKED had a curfew, but not all that keen to find out. For turn after turn, we didn't meet a single person, the offices and the meeting rooms lying dark and empty. It was only when we came into one of the back corridors, with only one or two offices, that we suddenly heard voices.

"-not what we planned. They keep saying all the plans are coming together with the Candidates, but they're missing something."

"And all this is going to fix that?"

Newt and I exchanged worried glances. The voices were coming from in front of us on the only way back to the dorms. We had to stay there. Pressing ourselves back into one of the potted plant alcoves, we waited. The voices were both male, low and whispering harshly. They didn't seem to have heard us.

"It's supposed to. According to calculations." The first voice sounded bitter.

"Your calculations?"

"Of course not!" The voice was fierce now. "Sorry."

"No. I shouldn't even have asked."

"They're kids, T."

The men had to be talking about us - but they didn't sound as hopeful as Janson had about what we were doing.

"I know. But what can we do?"

"Anything but this. Anything. It isn't working - I've told Paige God knows how many times. But she knows everything."

There was silence for a while and some banging around in the office to the left, like someone violently throwing things into drawers.

"How's progress on the Project? Did that Elpis shipment go through?"

I think that was 'T'? He sounded slightly younger than the first man.

"Yes, thank God. The people in the villages managed to radio back. It's going to be a few weeks before we can really get to work with the chemicals - the Centre's only half built, but Julie's got the funding. I'm doing what I can here, but it's getting limited now. If I try and withdraw any more Flare samples, it's going to be noticed and I can't risk that. Because of Electricity and because of her."

Julie? So, that was her I'd seen a few days before. WICKED must have faked her death in the Scorch. Were they talking about Project Electricity?

"Can you get out? We need you, Doc."

"No. Not yet."

"You're still keeping up the act?"

"I've got to." He sounded almost sad now. "They've got her, T. What's stopping them from throwing her into a Phase Three that she'd never recover from? I've got to. At least until we can figure out a way to get them out of here."

"Will you be okay until then? How are you feeling?"

A long sigh that had years in it. "Not great. Headaches. I'm seeing things at times - just patterns and colours at the moment, but it's started. But that hardly matters, we've just got to get them out and get the ball rolling down in Andes. We'll worry about me later."

Their voices were getting further and further away. I didn't understand almost all of what they were saying - it sounded like they were both workers on the Project, but that they were also workers for WICKED. Is that what the lightning symbols were - marking the supporters of the secret cause? There was something about their voices that I couldn't quite place... The younger man spoke then, not sounding sure about the other man's declaration.

"Okay. If you say so. Well, I'd better call it a night. I'm supervising tomorrow morning - are you coming up?"

"Just let me send - done it. Yes, but I'll take the stairs, there's another sham report Paige wants by eleven."

"Alright. G'Night, Doc. Lotta love."

A husky laugh from the 'Doc'. "Goodnight, Timmy."

I knew I'd heard that voice before. So, Timmy was an undercover worker too - is that why he'd told me all that stuff about Project Electricity? I wondered whether the other man was the mechanoengineer he'd mentioned, their guy deep on the inside. If he was ill, the whole project could collapse. But it wasn't only Timmy's voice that had seemed familiar. There was something about the other man's too, about the accent, the way he phrased things that rattled the lock on my memory, trying to escape from WICKED's neurological trap. Where do I know you from?

We waited until the footsteps of the two men died away and I whispered to Newt:

"Did you recognise them?"

He looked confused. "The men? No. Did you?"

"The second man was one of our rescuers on the coach from the Maze. Timmy. He's part of a secret project going on under WICKED's nose that doesn't involve the Maze or the brain patterns."

"Sounds good to me. Who's the other guy?"

"I don't know, but I think I recognise him. I've met him somewhere before, but I can't remember where. I was hoping you would."

"Nope, not a thing. I'd love to know what they were yapping about though - sounds like nobody was supposed to hear 'em."

I nodded, still trying to search my mind for any trace of the first man. Newt sighed and twined his fingers with mine again, pulling me back down the corridor. "Come on then, Lilby. Before Janson roasts us on a spit."


	28. Lives, Launchers and Moths to a Lightbulb

**Chapter 28 - Lives, Launchers and Moths to a Lightbulb**

**TWO WEEKS LATER**

If WICKED had really wanted to convince us to let them put metal in our brains again, this probably wasn't the best way to do it.

Janson had ordered us all into the auditorium that morning and fed us the same spiel about saving the world that we'd heard a million times before and then told us that they were about to remove the Swipe - the implant that had wiped our memories.

If anybody had dropped off during the first half of Janson's speech, they were wide awake then, suddenly faced with the enormity of retrieving over a decades worth of lost information, good, bad and otherwise and entirely without warning.

Without answering the barrage of questions that always followed any declaration of his, Janson had led us out of the auditorium and deeper into the complex than we had ever been, fierce whispering filling the air as we followed him. We turned corner after corner of WICKED's identical corridors before finally reaching an enormous metal door, four feet thick and bolted in three places. Janson had pressed a white keycard into the door, which slowly squealed open, not doing anything to alleviate the nerves of the teenagers clustered behind it, and hurried us through, making sure that door was completely closed before opening the one in front.

The smaller door - wooden and without an air filter - led into a wide room, decorated in almost exactly the same way as the corridors we'd trooped down: coral walls and beige tiles. It would have looked like all of the other rooms we'd been abandoned in at WICKED, if not for the hospital-style beds and the metal contraptions lining the walls.

These were the inventions that Newt and I had watched arrive at WICKED a couple of weeks before, and they were no friendlier up close. Each bed had a metal mask attached, twisted prongs, electrical circuits and spiralling plastic making it up, like a sick distortion of those Halloween masks you make in Kindergarten. Janson looked almost proud as he leaned on one of the machines.

"This is how we're going to remove the Swipe from your brains," He smiled, patronising in his attempt at pity. "Don't worry, I know these devices look frightening, but the procedure won't hurt nearly as much as you might think."

Well, that's comforting.

"Nearly as much? I don't like the sound of that. So it does hurt, is what you're really saying."

Frypan spoke what everyone was thinking. We'd formed two lines on either side of the room, curving around the bed where Janson stood. Frypan was directly opposite me, between Minho and Clint and his arms were folded as he glared at Janson. Newt, on the other side of Minho, was nodding.

Janson ignored all of the gazes fixed upon him and turned away from us, tapping instructions into a computer to the left of the beds as he answered: "Of course you'll experience minor discomfort – it is a surgery." Things started to whir and flash on the machine he was manipulating. "We'll be removing a small device from the part of your brain devoted to long-term memory. But it's not as bad as it might sound, I promise."

"Is this going to take away whatever's in there that lets you control us, too? And what about..." Teresa spoke up, from Charlie's left, her voice tailing off. We all knew what she'd been about to say - it made sense that the telepathy she, Aris, Rachel and Thomas shared was controlled by the same implant. Her gaze flew to Thomas.

Thomas had been thrown into the auditorium with us earlier on that morning, without any explanation or introduction at all, as if he'd gone out for a meeting rather than missing, presumed crazy for three weeks. He looked haggard now - the haunted look that all of us seemed to have, far more prominently painted across his features - but not even slightly insane as he stood next to Newt and Minho. He avoided Teresa's gaze.

Janson looked over his shoulder briefly, as if we were persistent flies rather than a group of kids. "You'll have your long-term memory restored, and we won't be able to manipulate your minds. It's a package deal, I'm afraid. Take it or leave it."

And there was the game changer. So we could let WICKED put whatever torture instruments they wanted into our heads today or we could run the risk of them being able to do whatever they wanted with our bodies as long as we resisted? And that was if they were telling the truth. Everyone stayed silent for a few seconds, thirty brains running through their individual dilemmas at a hundred miles an hour. Thomas told me much later that his problem had only ever been WICKED's control mechanism - the last thing he needed back were the memories of the years he'd been their lapdog - but that wasn't my dilemma. I wanted to remember. I wanted to understand the voices that filtered into my dreams, to remember my first family as well as this one, to see how the world could be so broken that it would let WICKED build a Maze full of far worse than a Minotaur. But if they'd taken our memories, controlled our bodies with those implants, who knew what else they could do if we gave them another chance? I wasn't about to surrender my humanity for science.

I looked across the circle at Newt, who was frowning, biting the nails of his left hand as he thought. Any relationship in the WICKED facility was always going to be difficult to start and be the centre of attention, and we'd kept it as quiet as we could and made it as much of a non-event as possible. Lily and Newt. Newt and Lily. That was how it was. Plus, there were enough other people making out far more obviously and parading around that there hadn't been much fuss - except from Minho, who had teased us for at least a week ('So, what are you guys going to name your first kid? Bagsie being godfather!' etc.)

But we'd carried on remembering - every night, we'd dream fragments of other times, usually with each other, often with Karly and Min, sometimes with Charlie and a small dark-haired boy that I hadn't seen around here, sometimes with the boy Newt had called Alby. Newt had always meant something to me, I suppose, back in the Maze as a vague reminder that there was an outside - and people always say getting attached to the idea of a person is dangerous, because no real person can ever live up to your imagination, but that wasn't how it had happened with him. N was beyond imagination - and I don't mean that in a low-budget teen romcom kind of way, that he's some kind of God, just that he's not the kind of person you can make up. His laugh, his height, his accent (all of which could be pretty scary) along with his compassion, his ambition, the way his smile always tugged from one corner of his mouth first, were all puzzle pieces that you'd never try to put together, but somehow fit without much force. And somehow, despite the short time we had in that facility, by then, no matter what 'N' had meant to me in the Maze, what my imagination had conjured, the real one meant more.

Newt looked tired that day, even before Janson had started this game. He'd had trouble sleeping lately - the dreams, the cramp his leg gave him, but particularly the persistent headaches he'd been having had kept him awake. As I looked at him, he caught my eye and raised his eyebrows, spreading his hands slightly. "What are you thinkin'?"

I bit my lip and shook my head slightly. 'I don't know...'

I was about to lean across to grab Karly's arm to ask her, when Janson coughed suddenly:

"Okay, I think we're just about ready."

He turned away from the screen, rubbing his hands together before picking up a clipboard from the next table, a momentary frown flitting across his face and his expression became stony in a way that sent a cold feeling through me.

"One last thing, though. Something I need to tell you before you regain your memories. It'll be better to hear it from me than to . . . remember the testing."

"What're you talking about?" Harriet's voice came from somewhere behind me, laced with fear.

Janson took a deep breath, seeming to steady himself. "Some of you are immune to the Flare. But . . . some of you aren't. I'm going to go through the list – please do your best to take it calmly."

The noise that had been gradually rising and bubbling ever since we'd entered the room, taken in the metal hospital beds and Janson's promise, died in a millisecond, and in its place, the resulting silence built into a roar in our ears, a silence filled with fear and disbelief and hope that not even the hum and beep of WICKED's machine could shatter.

I think every one of us went through the same rollercoaster of emotion

in those few seconds. Relief hit first, that there was a chance - a likelihood even - that we would never get the Flare, that we might never become the shells of humanity that we'd fought, that we'd killed in the tunnels of the Scorch. Then came the horror - that some of us were not. I've tried to explain to people the family that WICKED accidentally gave us all and I always run out of words - you didn't like them all, you weren't the same as any of them, but they were what you had, and you'd do anything to protect them, to stay together. The idea that some of these people, that we'd survived with, could catch it, probably already had caught it, brought the next feeling: abject fear as my blood ran cold, as Janson read the first name.

"Newt."

Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Thomas hit the ground, one hand pressed to his chest. I was already walking. A bolted door, thicker than the one behind us, with three locks and an access code slammed down over my imagination as Janson kept talking, as I crossed the room to N and took his hand, squeezing hard, not thinking, not thinking.

I'm here, we're alright. You're alright.

Newt looked down at me then and I saw the whole thing in his eyes. His expression was vacant at first, like he wasn't seeing me, like he wasn't even in the room. Then his eyes focused and I saw the horror, the horror he had to be imagining, the horror that had almost ripped out his eyes in the Scorch, that ran in front of their bus on the way out of the Maze, the horror that had clawed at their windows in the Rescue Centre. I saw the fear. But then I saw the steel enter his expression, the Teflon layer that he wrapped around himself in that second, saw him straighten his shoulders and take a breath slightly deeper than before. I'm here, we're alright. You're alright. And then he looked at me again - saw me - and he smiled, a small, tight-lipped, 'I'm okay' smile. But he squeezed back so hard it hurt my fingers.

Not thinking, not thinking, not thinking.

"Tommy, slim yourself." N's voice wasn't quite its usual pitch, but Thomas didn't notice.

"Slim myself? That old shank just said you're not immune to the Flare. How can you—" Thomas had spun at Newt's words, but letting him talk any more would mean thinking, so Newt cut him off, smiling again.

"I'm not worried about the bloody Flare, man. I never thought I'd still be alive at this buggin' point – and living hasn't exactly been so great anyway."

That still hurts. How can a corporation damage someone to the point that they can say that and nobody there will question it? Thomas pulled himself together in those seconds too, straightening up and plastering a smile just as genuine onto his own face.

"If you're cool with slowly going crazy and wanting to eat small children, then I guess we won't cry for you."

"Good that." Newt's smile vanished. Minho, who was still on Newt's other side, rested a hand on his shoulder and N nodded at him. The Ivy Trio. Not the original one. But brothers all the same.

With Newt's fingers twined in mine, I finally turned to look at the aftermath of the bomb that had fallen. Raven was sitting on the floor, her head in her hands, Sara and Elle next to her, each with an arm around her shoulder, noiseless tears streaming down their faces too. No. Something twisted in my chest. That's not fair. She was the only Group B control left. I remembered Raven sprinting into the Maze ten minutes before the Doors slammed shut - which would almost certainly have killed her if something went wrong - just because I asked her to. That's not fair. Jackson was standing back from the group, staring blankly at the door we'd entered through. Mike was talking to him, but I don't think he heard a word of it. Another boy I didn't know had a hand to his forehead, trying to hold back tears.

Not thinking, not thinking, not thinking.

Janson, for once, when my eyes landed on him, looked unsettled. Rather than rushing, he let the seconds stretch into minutes as the death sentences sunk in, burning as they did. Janson's eyes flitted from person to person, his expression unreadable. I felt his gaze on Newt and me and looked up, meeting it. What is there left to be scared of? His eyes were brown, but a watery brown, like a muddied river rather than the earth brown of the boy next to me. Janson didn't bother holding my gaze and instead clapped his hands together:

"Now, everyone. I wanted to get that out of the way. Most of you not immune are in the early stages of the Flare, and I have every confidence that you'll be taken care of before it goes too far. But the Trials required your participation."

Liar.

"And what if you don't figure things out?" Minho spat. His voice was saturated with hatred. The fact that Janson ignored him triggered gasping sobs from the edges of the room. Janson headed for a small door at the far side of the room. When he reached the threshold, he turned.

"Give me just a few moments to make sure the medical teams are ready. You can take this time to make your decisions."

That was when the silence broke. Struggling to hear over the waves of noise that kept crashing over us, we talked to Teresa - while Minho bristled every second - who talked to Aris. They were all for it, not seeing why WICKED would ever trick us again. I saw the point, I guess. But all I could think about was the message they themselves had given us. Trust nothing and no-one. Not even yourselves. How did we even know the memories they'd give us would be our own?

"Well, that settles it for me," Minho decided. "If Aris and Teresa are for it, I'm against it."

Teresa rolled her eyes, expecting that. She turned to Thomas and her face was hopeful, expectant. Their relationship is still something that I don't really understand - whatever betrayal happened, whatever love there was between them - but I think it was intense, like everything in there was, and that, at least, is a feeling I know. But Thomas' face stayed expressionless, his eyes hard. The Scorch had broken something that Teresa couldn't fix.

"Karly? Lily?" She turned away from Thomas, forcing her face into passivity too. I saw Aris tune in from across the room.

I thought about it. "Nettie, baby, don't you ever let anyone tell you what you want - you find something you want and you fight for it." Who are you? But then I felt Newt shift a little, leaning into me as Frypan squashed into the conversation and the locked door in my head started to rattle as something beat on the inside - stop thinking.

Trust nothing and no-one. Not in this place. I answered slowly, looking around the room one more time. "I...I don't think so. I don't buy it. There's too much they could screw up. We were kids - how much can those memories help us now? Other than making us remember everything else that we've lost?"

Karly was nodding. "I'm with Lil. Me neither."

"Suit yourselves." Teresa spun on her heel and headed back to Aris, where he was standing with Harriet and Sonya. Neither of them seemed entirely convinced, but they were nodding as he spoke. Minho met Karly's eyes, some kind of affirmation passing between them, before he glanced across at me, giving me a nod and half a smile.

"Ah, man," Frypan said, running his fingers through his hair. "We can't let them put those things on our face, can we? I'd just be happy back in my kitchen in the Homestead, I swear I would."

It was depressing that - after years of wishing we could escape the Maze, working every minute of every hour to get out - the real world sucked so much that we'd actually rather go back. But in the end, that would be even less than a life - it would be avoiding life. Living a lie. Newt wasn't convinced by Fry's assessment either.

"You forget about the Grievers?" He asked.

Frypan hesitated. "They never messed with me in the kitchen, now, did they?"

"Yeah, well, we'll just have to find you a new place to cook." Newt's voice was harsher now, cracks showing up in the Teflon as we kept going back and forth. He moved away from the group, pulling me with him and grabbing Thomas by the arm with his free hand. He gestured away from the others so that Minho followed us with Karly.

"I've heard enough bloody arguments. I'm not getting on one of those beds either, Lil."

Minho just nodded, squeezing Newt's shoulder again. "Me neither."

"Same here." Thomas finished. His expression was calculating as he leaned close, so that any of the bugs or the people nearby wouldn't catch his words.

"We'll stick around, play along and act nice," he whispered. "But as soon as we get a chance, we're going to fight our way out of this place."

They didn't call us until the second room, at the end of the long corridor, a carbon copy of the first. Janson took his place at the front of the room, tapping the top of his pencil on the clipboard, like a teacher about to take a register.

"Right. In this room, we've got..." He flipped to the second page. "Siggy, Newt, Sara, Mike and Lilianne."

Newt didn't hesitate, making sure he looked Janson in the eye. "I'm not doing it. You said we could choose and that's my bloody decision."

Some of the others looked around in surprise - he was, after all, one of the four who were sick - but Janson tutted, scribbled something on his board and looked up at Newt, giving him a couple of seconds, waiting for him to change his answer.

"That's fine," He answered. "You'll change your mind soon enough. Stay with me until we've finished distributing everyone else."

He turned around as the others took their places, tapping at the machine for this room, about to address the doctors when I called.

"Neither am I, sir."

Janson's fingers stopped moving on the screen and he spun back, clipboard in hand, beyond irritation now. He put the clipboard down on the table behind him and stepped up towards me. He was significantly taller than I was and Newt took a step closer to me, but for once, Janson's expression wasn't threatening - hadn't been since he read out the names of the infected Gladers. He just frowned slightly and looked at my face before asking:

"And what is your reasoning for that, Lilianne?" This had to be as close as Janson had ever come to looking even vaguely considerate. "I assure you, there is no danger in the procedure."

This close to him, I could see the wrinkles around Janson's eyes and mouth. The laughter lines amongst them surprised me. He hadn't even given us the flicker of a genuine smile over the last month and I found myself wondering in those milliseconds, what kind of man he was when he wasn't ordering around thirty teenagers who despised him - or maybe the kind of man he'd been before this place had made him what he was, replaced emotion with icy determination, whether he'd-

"Don't let the decisions of others influence you." Every wandering thought about Janson as a real human evaporated in a sudden rush of fury as Janson glanced between Newt and I.

"You've never given us a choice about that." I replied. That was all WICKED had done to us for longer than we could remember. How dare he talk about the 'decisions of others'? WICKED had given Newt, Raven and the rest a death sentence. Stop thinking.

This at least made Janson pause for a few seconds before responding. "Perhaps. But we have explained ourselves, Miss Pasteur. Please do us the same courtesy."

"Frankly, I don't trust you. You've not given us a single reason to." I looked up at N, who gave me a ghost of a smile. I thought about the dreams we'd shared - the memories before that. That night on the balcony, watching these machines roll in. And the answer was easy. I waited until Janson was looking at me, until he met my eyes. "And I've already remembered everything I need."

Newt squeezed my hand as Janson stayed uncharacteristically silent, before nodding slowly and stepping away, a hard expression back on his thin face. "All right...if that's the way you feel about it - for now, at least - both of you stay with me until all Subjects have been distributed."

And WICKED's twisted conveyor belt kept rolling, Janson shooting Newt and I unreadable looks as we went. He didn't call the others until we reached the final room.

"No thanks," Minho just waved as the rest of the Subjects trooped past us into the room. "But I appreciate the invitation. You guys have a good time in there."

"Without either of us." Karly shook her head at Janson, daring him to challenge her. He didn't have time before Thomas was there too.

"I'm not doing it, either."

Despite the supposed 'choice' they'd given us, Janson stared at the five of us for a long time, his eyes finally fixing on Thomas as the seconds ticked past - as if Janson was running through something in his mind, as if he was trying to trigger something in Thomas' as he had done with me and, to a lesser extent, with N.

"You okay, there, Mr. Rat Man?" Minho's tone was mocking, his eyebrows raised. "Why are you goggling at Thomas?"

Janson swivelled his gaze to Minho, thinly veiled disapproval on his face. "Because there are many things to consider."

He straightened the lapels of his white suit. "But very well. We said you could choose for yourselves, and we'll stand by that. Everyone come inside and we'll get things started with those willing to participate."

The last room was, unsurprisingly, identical to every other one in the corridor. Did they have a program for building that, I wondered, like that old game - Minecraft or something? - or did they just have analysts in every room making sure this one is a clone of the one before?

Suddenly, one of the green-suited doctors behind a torture contraption flew away from her bench, across the room, and threw her arms around Thomas, who looked dumbfounded but squeezed her back, almost lifting her up off the floor. The rest of us just had time to share looks of confusion when Janson's voice rang around the room:

"Brenda, what are you doing! Get back to your post!"

Brenda. The girl that the boys had picked up in the Scorch, that had nearly fallen out of the Berg when we were picked up. Doesn't she have the Flare?

Sick or not, she was still holding onto Thomas and, from the angle we were at, we could see her whispering frantically into his ear.

"BRENDA!" Janson rubbed a spot just above his ear before screaming at her again. She finally pulled back, apologising, while Janson carried on tutting, starting to assign Gladers to various beds.

"What do you think they'll do with us?" Newt whispered, resting an elbow on my shoulder. The five of us were leaning against the wall nearest to the door, waiting.

"I'm not sure." Janson had thrown us a few more suspicious glances by now. "Definitely something. Look at him."

Newt nodded, biting his lip. He reached across, fiddling with a pin at the back of my braid and tucking a loose strand in, for something, anything, to do before our moment came - or our verdict did.

"Thank you." I glanced at him, and the veins of his arm caught the light as I did and my mind filled with snapshots in garish colours - the Crank outside the rescue bus, his veins black against his scarred skin, the way his eyes had rolled back in his head as he charged the bus with his skull until there was dark blood running down into his eyes. Newt's eyes - Stop. Stop thinking.

"You five rebels are being watched. Don't even think about trying anything. Armed guards are on their way as we speak." Janson gave us a final glare before moving to the control machine, which was already whirring under his fingertips.

Minho just scoffed and leaned in, whispering too. "That's a bunch of klunk. I think we should take our chances, see what happens."

"Take our chances against gunmen?" Karly hissed, echoing my thoughts exactly. "Are you crazy?"

She gasped slightly and looked at Newt. "Sorry."

He shook his head, brushing it off straightaway. "Whatever. We've just got to-"

As if summoned by Karly's words, the doors next to us slammed open and six people, dressed in black vests with ropes and pistols attached, charged into the room. They were each holding an enormous weapon in both hands - it almost looked more like a Super Soaker than a gun. The centre of each one was bright blue and seemed to glow, but if you looked closely, you could see the individual grenades crackling inside the gun. We wouldn't have a chance. Janson sauntered over, his arms folded and his eyebrows raised.

"These are called Launchers. These guards will not hesitate to fire them if any of you cause trouble. The weapons won't kill you, but trust me when I say that they'll give you the most uncomfortable five minutes of your life."

He nodded to the six soldiers. "Guards, escort Thomas and the others to their rooms, where they can dwell on their mistakes until tomorrow morning's tests. Use whatever force is necessary."

Later - The Locked Dormitory

The room we'd been unceremoniously dragged down identical corridors and thrown into wasn't what any of us had been expecting. It wasn't a cell, or a dungeon, but a small bedroom made up of three sets of bunk beds and a kitchenette with a tiny table attached. We'd raided the fridge long ago and, now we'd exhausted all of our ideas about WICKED, Brenda, the tests and how on Earth we were going to get the hell out of here, we were all slumped on the carpet talking about nothing and everything. It must have been evening by then, though we had no way of knowing - our temporary prison had no windows.

"So, Thomas." I said from my spot next to Minho. He looked up from where he'd been picking a hole in the beige carpet. "Are you okay? We were kind of worried they'd tied you to a chair in a shed somewhere."

Karly rolled her eyes. "Once the Medic, Lils..."

Thomas gave a weak half-laugh. "They didn't even give me a chair. I had a bucket and a table. And it was fancier than that, actually - I had a padded cell."

"Ooh," Minho mock bowed in Thomas' direction. "Look at Thomas - our regular royal, with his special treatment. Reduced to sharing a bunk bed with criminals."

We all spluttered - it wasn't very funny, but we needed to laugh at something. Newt suddenly had a thought and sat forward, gesturing between Thomas, Karly and I.

"Hey - you guys have met all nice and proper before, right?"

"It wasn't all nice." I laughed. "But we've met."

Thomas nodded. "Nice after you untied me from that rotting tree. What counts as proper?"

Newt uncrossed his legs, stretching them across the carpet and said. "Like I showed ya' with Brenda, Tommy. Shake her hand."

Thomas sighed, like sitting up was a lot of effort, but stretched his hand out. "Am I doing the cringey one-liner too? Thomas Edison. I used to work for these shuckfaces and I'm going to take them down."

Intense. I didn't think I was up to that level of serious forward thinking. I took his hand and shook it. "Lily Pasteur. I'm a terrible runner and I can stitch wounds in seven different ways."

"Wow!" Thomas said. "I'll keep that in mind - does that go for embroidery too, or what?

"Nope. Unless you really love the aesthetic of sutures."

Thomas turned to Karly on his right and offered his hand again. "Thomas Edison." He deadpanned.

"Karly Linnaeus." She took it, but before she could finish, Minho jumped in.

"She's a celebrated baton twirler from Minnesota and she can kill men with her bare hands."

Karly shoved him but then leaned back against the post behind her, closing her eyes and said: "Only half of that is true."

Thomas nodded again and scooted quickly back into Newt on his other side, putting a solid foot between himself and Karly, who smirked approvingly.

"So," Thomas looked at Minho and Karly, then up at me. "Are you guys all 'together' now then?"

'Together'. We'd never said that - certainly hadn't ever put labels like 'boyfriend' and 'girlfriend' on whatever was going on between people. Those weren't the sort of words that seemed to belong to prisoners of science in our glorified cells. Sitting there, trying to think of an answer, I realised that I preferred 'together'. When you stripped back all the insinuations and the suggestions and the cliches attached to relationships, that was what we were - together, for whatever the universe decided to throw at us that day. Before I could give Thomas any answer, Minho was waggling his eyebrows at Karly:

"Well? Are we 'together', baby?"

"No." Karly's answer was quick and she laughed at Minho's resulting expression. "We're not - well, not halfway-married-together, like these two-" She gestured at me and Newt, and I snorted while Newt rolled his eyes to the ceiling as Karly carried on. "We're seeing how it goes, I guess. Maybe we'll put labels on shit when we're not in a den full of psychos-"

Everyone looked at Newt, without thinking. He glanced up and snapped: "Bloody hell, it's just a shucking word. I'm not suddenly gonna start crying or clawing your buggin' eyeballs out." He bit his lip and softened his voice a little. "When I am, I'll let ya' all know, okay?"

Newt smiled - that unnerving one that didn't come anywhere close to his eyes - in an attempt to diffuse the situation. Nobody had mentioned the elephant in the room yet. Nobody had wanted to think about it. I'd moved on to the next thing to the next to the next to avoid it and Thomas was clearly doing the same.

"Okay. So, you're together but not together. Thank you, that's cleared that up." He craned his neck round to Newt. "What about you two? Are you a thing?"

Our eyes met and a real smile tugged on the corners of Newt's mouth. "Yes. I think. Are we a thing?"

"We're a thing. Not sure what kind of thing, but a thing. Yes." I tapped his knee with my foot, the closet I could get from the other side of the carpet.

"So eloquent, Lilby." Newt arched an eyebrow.

"Oh, shut up."

"See." Minho smirked. "They're so a thing. They even argue like old married people."

"They're star-crossed lovers. Fill Thomas in on your memory psychobabble, guys." Karly added.

Thomas looked bemused. "Memory psychobabble?"

"Oh!" Newt nodded. "I forgot ya' missed all that, Tommy."

Giving him the bullet point version, we filled Thomas in on the memories we'd had filter back, the weird corrosion with our implants and the jewellery. He told us about some of the dreams he'd had - about his family and his work with WICKED. Minho and Karly started making up potential pasts to feel 'included':

"I was definitely an Olympian."

"At thirteen?" Karly looked sceptical.

"I was a prodigy. Obviously."

And we waffled on like that until somebody yawned for the hundredth time and Newt finally pushed himself up from the floor, yawning too.

"Whatever the bloody hell happens tomorrow, we're gonna need all the strength we can get. And WICKED have never been all that big on lettin' us sleep." He kicked his shoes off and swung himself up onto one of the top bunks. "Time for bed, I reckon."

Everyone, suddenly aware of how tired we all were, even though - action wise - we'd been sitting down almost all day. I rolled onto the bottom bunk of one of the other sets and Karly took the top as Thomas climbed to the top of the third and Minho got into the bed below Newt's. We turned off the single flickering bedside lamp, but a harsh glow still shone in under the locked door from the corridor outside, casting strange shadows over everyone's faces.

"Hey guys?" Minho's voice came out of the simulated twilight.

"Yeah?" Thomas answered.

"What do you think Rat Man wears in bed?"

An immediate "What?!" came from every other occupied bed in the room.

"I mean - is it that same creepy white suit, but made outta silk or something?"

"Probably..." Newt sounded half asleep already.

"Or maybe just white boxers?" Thomas wondered.

"Ugh!" I cut off that thought as soon as possible. "I didn't know my eyes could bleed when they were closed."

There was silence for a couple of seconds before Karly joined in. "Do you think it's the same suit? Or does he just have a wardrobe full of white suits, like with the Scooby Doo crew?"

"I hope it's the wardrobe." Minho sighed. "Man. If we ever get out of here, I'm getting me a suit like that."

"Shut up." I could hear the smile in Newt's voice as a pillow flew out of the darkness and hit Minho in the face. "Go to sleep."

"You're not even my real dad..." Minho muttered, in a fake whining tone. "Fine. Night night, shuckfaces. Don't let the bedbugs bite."

2:50am - The Locked Dormitory

I was awake. I couldn't remember what I'd been dreaming a couple of seconds before, but whatever it was had dissolved into the half light of the bedroom as I rolled onto my back, trying to work out what it was that had jolted me awake. I could see the slats of Karly's bunk above me, bending slightly as she changed position in her sleep. There was a tiny moth springing in and out of the room under the door, creeping in in the vain hope of finding light with us, before flicking out again to the artificial lights of WICKED's corridors.

There wasn't any sound from the corridors outside, besides the quiet yet constant hum of the alarms and electric lighting strips. Inside the room, Minho was snoring - a snuffle with every breath in and Thomas was tossing, changing sides every minute or so, in time with his chaotic dreams. As I lay there, another sound gradually filtered into my consciousness: breathing, but not soft and regular like all the other patterns in the dorm - instead, this was staggered, shuddering, but forced, like the person was trying and failing to take normal breaths. I sat up, ducking my head to avoid the edge of Karly's bunk as I swung my feet onto the carpet. Newt and Minho's bunk was the one opposite, and though Minho was definitely asleep, his head on his arms and his soft snores still echoing, N wasn't.

He was leaning against the headboard, looking straight ahead at the ageing wood of the doorframe and picking at a scar on his right arm as he took breaths that seemed to rattle in his throat. I felt my own throat close up as something like fear twisted in my stomach. Please don't lea - don't. Don't think. Being careful not to knock Karly, or wake Minho, I tiptoed across the carpet and climbed onto the first rung of his ladder. That was when Newt heard me, jolting back, his eyes wide until he processed who it was. The harsh light from under the door just about lit his face, and I could see the tracks of the tears that had coursed down to his jaw and the ones that were still shining in his eyes as he frantically blinked them back. He ducked his head, rubbing his eyes with the back of his hand before whispering:

"Hey."

"Hey."

"I'm fine."

I nodded. "I'm cold."

A flicker of a smile. He knew I knew. "Well. Come here, then, Lilybird."

Newt shuffled backwards in the bed towards the wall and held out the edge of the blanket. With some difficulty, I climbed over the rail and in next to him. Newt wrapped an arm around me and pulled me back against his chest, my legs tangling with his under the blanket.

"Bloody hell, you are cold. That okay?"

"Mmhmm." I reached up and twined my fingers with his. "Thank you."

Newt made an affirmative noise and I felt his shoulders relax behind me. After a while, the rattle in his throat disappeared and his breathing became slow and regular. He was asleep again - but I wasn't. Counting sheep, goats, horses - everything morphed into lunatics or soldiers or WICKED doctors with their green scrubs and fifty-pronged Swipe machines. After about half an hour, I lifted Newt's arm slightly, and rolled over so I was facing him, pushing myself up onto one elbow. There was something about Newt's face in that light that reminded me of Charlie. I wondered where she was that night, whether she was okay. I hoped she'd found some good memories in with everything else WICKED had forced into her life. I hoped she knew we'd always come back if we escaped.

Does everyone look younger when they sleep? When all of the terrifying realities of the world than age them dissolve into the world of make believe in dreams? When I first started working at the hospital a few years ago, I remember taking in family members to visit patients while they slept. It often made people cry - the uninhibited innocence of it compared to the pandemonium of being awake.

The way they looked at the people they loved always reminded me of that night; Newt's hair was still too long - he'd been meaning to cut it all month - falling to his shoulders. He had a smattering of freckles across his nose and his cheekbones that hadn't been there in my memories, a product of years in the Glade, and his eyelashes were long - they were darker than you'd expect too, brown rather than blonde. The bruise on his jaw, a memento from his Combat task with Harriet, had almost faded. He'd been studying the colour changes with interest - it had gone red, then purple, then green, but now it had shifted to brown, just a couple of shades darker than his skin tone. Then I remembered the people we'd met in the tunnels a few weeks before, the scratches and sores that had covered their faces that would never fade, a permanent reminder of the virus raging through every cell in their body and my breath caught in my throat, choking me. No. Don't think.

I must have started because the next time I looked down, Newt was blinking up at me through the strange 3:40am half light, his dark eyes clouded with sleep, but questioning. I shook my head and smiled, lying back down next to him and snuggling into his chest. Newt fell back to sleep instantly and I tried to match my breaths to his.

I remember noticing that the moth was still creeping in and out under the door as I tried to fall asleep and thinking, as sleep crept in again, dreams finally claiming me too, that maybe we were both just looking for lightbulbs.


	29. Spiders, Shakespeare and Shirts with Buttons

**Chapter 29 - Spiders, Shakespeare and Shirts with Buttons**

**THREE DAYS LATER**

**The Berg outside Denver**

"Okay, muchachos, we're going to need the second door on the right. Lily, that's the one you'll need in the morning, too, you got me?"

Jorge and I were bending over the maps of Denver that we'd downloaded off NetBlock earlier that morning, amidst the chaos of the supplies we were throwing into bags for the journey, and papers that would convince first the Denver operatives to let us in and then convince Brenda's doctor friend Hans to take the implants out of our brains that allowed WICKED to control us.

"Yep." I tossed three water bottles and some apples into one of the rucksacks and scrabbled in a nearby drawer for a flashlight. "Is that all they'll ask for?"

Jorge had an A4 folder out on the table and was flicking through the pages, his expression focused. He pulled one of the sets of papers out and handed it to me - it all looked very official, if you ignored the fact that only my photograph and my first name were even vaguely true. 'Lilianne Peterson' was twenty and originally from the Bronx, apparently - a nurse in a New York hospital. I could work with that.

  
  


"Yes." Jorge replied. "That and a Viral Contagion Test, but that'll be no problem."

"Got it."

It was late morning by then and the sun was already burning through the skylight above us as everyone gathered in the commune area of the stolen Berg that we'd landed about half a mile from the towering walls of Denver - built ten years ago to keep out the Flare. It had been a decision that we'd argued about for hours in the air, going round in circles, but in the end, nobody had a better idea. We'd never thought about what we'd do if we actually managed to escape WICKED's clutches. In a way, the outside world had seemed no more real than one of their simulations before that point.

"Do you have the chequebook? And the maps for when you get inside? What about records - do you need some kind of medical records?"

Now they were about to leave, I was suddenly terrified that something would happen to the others inside the city and we'd never find out, stranded outside the walls while they got arrested or worse. Jorge must have heard the worry in my voice because he gave a huffing laugh and rubbed my shoulders, saying with a grin:

"We've got it all, don't you worry. Dontcha' know you're talking to the master of disguise here, sister?"

I nodded and forced a laugh. "Didn't forget for a second. Just be careful, okay?"

  
  


One of the steriliser machines for the water bottles pinged and I turned to pull it out and fill it, looking out of the window above the sink to where the walls rose impenetrable in front of us. This had once been an airport, according to Jorge and Brenda, but there wasn't a single aircraft on the miles of tarmac, and the lights of the control tower looked like they'd been extinguished for some time. I wondered why they'd decided to close it. Maybe not enough people want to see what's left of the world.

"When's the next check-in, Lils?" Karly called from her perch on the heavy oak table next to Thomas, both sorting supplies into Tupperware boxes. I tossed her a water bottle and answered:

"12:10, according to their website."

Thomas leaped down from the table and hauled his rucksack up into the space he'd left. "Damn. We'd better get going, then - Jorge?"

There was a strange caution about everyone that morning. At least at WICKED we'd had some idea of their limits, of the routines and the plans. Denver was about to be our first experience of 'real life' - something not calculated to monitor our emotions, but something we could just experience. We could make it in and out of Denver and be off before lunchtime tomorrow; we could all be arrested or anything in between.

"Yeah - give me five minutes. The walls aren't gonna evaporate, hermano. That lever controls the grounding for the Berg - it's a brake, basically, you shouldn't need to touch it. If you do, you'll be halfway across the desert in half an hour, boy."

  
  


Jorge was sitting with Newt now, going over the basics of the control panel for the next twenty-four hours. Nothing fancy - heat, electricity, internet, locked zones - and Newt was leaning on his elbow and nodding as Jorge pointed to lever after lever. He hadn't said very much that morning, other than a couple of words to Minho as they'd thrown supplies into his rucksack earlier. As Jorge was talking, Newt closed his eyes for a second, rubbing the bridge of his nose before quietly repeating Jorge's instructions back to him. He was trying to put on a normal front for the rest of us that morning, but I could see he wasn't feeling great - rubbing his temples and bouncing his bad leg every time he sat down.

Last night had been difficult. Newt had already told us he didn't care about the chip - he didn't want to go into a Quarantined city and risk infecting somebody else - but after two hours of arguing, when everyone was exhausted and worked up, Brenda offered to get him in anyway, saying that we could get past the scanners somehow. You can imagine how well that went down. There was now a hole in the wall of the sleeping area, and Thomas, Minho and I spent an hour talking Newt down while I picked splinters out of his knuckles. Nobody had suggested him coming again. He'd always been a worrier - making sure other people were eating, sleeping, healthy - but I hated (and was more than a little frightened) that he was already acting like his life meant nothing anymore.

Brenda had dragged all of the rucksacks over to the main doors of the Berg and was calling the others around her, her eyes flicking to the clock over the table - 11:50. She shot Jorge a 'hurry up' look, and he nodded and beckoned me over to the doors.

"You sure you're staying, hermana?" He asked me, his expression warmer than usual.

I glanced across at Newt who was standing with Karly, laughing at something she'd said that I couldn't catch and I gave my best shot at a reassuring smile. "I'm sure."

Nobody else had seen his face last night when Jorge had proposed staying overnight in Denver to give Hans time to carry out the operations, which would mean N staying overnight on an empty Berg that creaked when the wind blew through the propellers, blurring with the noises that had already started playing in his head anyway - they'd only heard the "Good that. I'm not goin' anywhere." when Jorge asked for a vote.

"Okay." Jorge's expression turned serious, focused on me. "Repeat the plan back to me, Lily. We can't have any slip-ups if you're gonna do this alone."

"7:30's the earliest check-in. The entrance door is the second one on the right. I hand over the papers in the file - Lilianne Peterson, I'm an associate of Jorge Gallaraga, here for information gathering and field testing - feed the data into their machine and then do the Viral Contagion Test."

"Right." Jorge's expression didn't waver. "We'll leave your name at their admissions desk. Then what?"

  
  


"Go through the government building, don't speak to anyone, make it to the Paperchase at the end of the mall and wait there."

Jorge nodded but Karly was frowning, biting her lip, "Is that going to be safe? If all these people are ready to jump Immunes?"

"It's probably smarter, actually." Brenda replied, tapping her nails on the folder in her arms. "If six Immunes arrive in an unmarked Berg at the same time, they might start asking questions and that's the last thing we want. There's not one major organisation in these places that's not funding WICKED."

"Damn straight." Jorge added. "One of us will be there to collect Lily at 7:30 anyway. And, the two of you will probably have a better chance at a cover story if a border patrol come round to check out the Berg than Newt on his own."

I grimaced. Any cover story involving an Immune and an infected WICKED Candidate could only ever be horrible - experiments and exploitation. Newt clearly wasn't any more thrilled by that than I was, raising his eyebrows at me and pulling a face. We'll cross that bridge when we come to it, I decided.

The clock above the table started chiming twelve and Brenda shouldered her rucksack, gesturing at Karly, Minho and Thomas to do the same. "We'd better go. Be careful you two."

She nodded at Newt and me. "Back at ya'." Newt replied, slapping Minho on the back. "Don't get eaten by anything - or bloody arrested."

"All this underestimation..." Jorge muttered, shaking his head and pulling the lever that triggered the whirring open of the enormous Berg doors and the lowering of the ramp.

Before she could step out of the doors, I ran forward and pulled Karly into a tight hug and she squeezed me back just as hard. "Don't fly off or die while I'm in there, baby." She said into my ear.

"Promise I won't fly off or die. Love you."

Karly stepped back and grinned. "Love you madly. And if you don't show at exactly 7:30 tomorrow, Lils, I'm raising an army."

"You better - see you!"

They all trooped down the ramp onto the dusty concrete, Newt pressed a couple of buttons on the control pad and the ramp retracted, and with a final cheesy wave from Minho, they disappeared as the doors clicked shut, leaving Newt and I staring at the corrugated steel of the closed doors.

The Berg, which had been filled with chaos of people packing bags, talking over each other and fighting with the NetBlock printer for the last three hours was suddenly quiet - only the humming of the air conditioning and the beeps of the control system reaching our ears and two people left to rattle around in it. Well then. There were a few minutes where we didn't quite know what to do with ourselves.

  
  


"You didn't have to do that, Lilby." Newt said from behind me. When I turned, he was perched on one of the windowsills, leaning against the window, trying to catch a glimpse of the others as they passed into the city, but he looked back at me as he spoke.

"I know." I rested my arm on his shoulder to look out too and he leant his head against mine for a few seconds with a half-smile. You could just about see the five figures disappearing into the dust that the breeze was throwing up from the nearby plains. And that was all that was said about it then. Whatever stereotypes WICKED had forcefed us, being sick never made Newt stupid.

12:30pm - The Storage Cupboard

"Well, whoever had this Berg last was either Victor Frankenstein or a serial killer." I reflected as we stood in front of the enormous Berg storage unit that Jorge had told us to take inventory of. Amongst the tins of beans, canned sausages, semolina and First Aid kits (ranging from paper cut level to 'whoops, lost an arm in that door'), were a wide variety of weapons - mostly knives - and metal contraptions with wicked-looking protrusions, some of which were glowing in the shadow of the cupboard.

"Good that. Whaddya' think this is?" Newt had pulled one of the contraptions out from the bottom shelf, causing a mini-avalanche of canned vegetables. The thing had a cylindrical base with a button on it and long metal claws at the top of the tube with rubber balls on the ends.

"Seriously?"

"No."

"Hmm...a massage thingy. Or a spider catcher."

"Bit big, isn't it?"

"Not for tarantulas."

"Ugh." Newt shuddered. "Don't. Let's see, shall we?"

"What?"

Before I could tell him that this was the last thing we should do, Newt had pressed the button on the base of the contraption. The claws shot out of the cylinder on a thin metal rod with a grinding sound, snapping until they slammed into the wall opposite us, still snapping and scraping at the wallpaper.

"Don't press the button! Have you never seen a sci-fi film? That's the number one rule!" I spun to him, my eyes wide with fake horror.

"Whoops." He grinned. "'Least it wasn't bloody radioactive."

"You think."

We looked at the machine again, scraping weakly against the wall, the fight seemingly draining out of it. Newt pressed the button again and sucked the claws back into the cylinder. He picked up the notepad and gave me a businesslike nod.

"Aaand...one spider catcher."

After a while, we got a box system going - food, First Aid, spare clothes, 'interesting', 'potentially useful', 'things that could probably kill you' and 'absolutely no way am I touching that'. We found maps of various major cities in America, communication devices we hoped Jorge could hack, a device that seemed to identify plants, another one that seemed to be a Swiss Army Knife gone mad with enough nail equipment for a serious manicure, but simultaneously containing five or six serrated steel knives amongst a lot of other things. The last box contained anything we'd noticed that seemed to glow with that eerie blue light, a set of green tinged bandages that were black around the edges and something that may once have been a sandwich but was now a technicolor fuzzy mass that looked like it could harbour a wide variety of tropical diseases.

"So that's what, seventeen tins of beans, twenty-four tinned lasagnas and thirty-eight hiking boots on that shelf - seventeen left feet and twenty-one right feet?" I asked, twirling the blue biro between my fingertips.

Newt was sitting cross-legged opposite me - it had turned into a pretty long job and we were down to the last shelf - but his gaze was much higher up, wandering somewhere between the first and second shelf a couple of centimetres down from the ceiling.

"N?"

He didn't respond, drawing circles absentmindedly on the floor with the fingers of his left hand. I crawled forwards a foot or so and tapped his shoulder.

"Newt? You okay?"

He jumped at the contact, turning instantly, his dark eyes focusing on me and he smiled suddenly. "What? Sorry, did ya' say something?"

"It doesn't matter." I tried to rearrange my concerned expression into something more normal as the twisting in my stomach settled again. "Have you got anything left on that one?"

  
  


"Yeah." Newt picked up the twisted metal instrument with sharpened metal prongs we'd discovered a few minutes earlier. "What did we decide this was?"

"Demon corkscrew. Or an automatic snake coiler."

"'Course. And-" Newt rolled backwards, crawling on his stomach to the back of the bottom shelf. "There's one more in here...hang on a sec."

A dull thunk echoed back to me as he banged his head on the shelf above. "Ow! Bloody hell. Oh, this is one for you, Lilbug - we could have a lesson!"

Newt shuffled back out from the shelf and handed me the last item. It was a series of what looked like plastic wheels, joined by bits of metal that shone with copper reflections and the top of the machine was covered in tiny notches and buttons that must link to a long lost manual in the depths of another cupboard - in reality, it was probably some kind of pocket Locator or tracking device, but in that second, only one thing came to mind as Newt smirked up at me.

"Radioactive rollerskates!"

3pm - Outside the Berg

The land around Denver was dry. That was the first thing you noticed and the only word I had to describe it. It was nothing like the endless sand of the Scorch, utterly devoid of any signs of ordinary life, but nothing like the simulated perfection of the WICKED compound either, lush and forested and repetitive. Everything outside Denver seemed brittle - fragile, somehow; the trees were a comforting change as we watched them blow in the breeze, but you felt that it would only take a decent wind to strip their few leaves from them and only a little more than that to tear off the spindly branches from the cracked trunks entirely. The expanses of grass were green and brown in patches and interrupted by the occasional cactus, which I hadn't realised grew so far north.

Denver's Quarantine walls dominated the skyline, imposing and impenetrable. They must have been almost a hundred feet tall, made out of dark concrete and punctuated only by the couple of doors at the base and some lookout panels for patrol teams at the top. Creepers had started to make their way up the concrete expanse at the bottom, but it looked like it might take them another decade to come anywhere close to the top.

"Reminds me of the Maze." Newt said, taking a slow sip of tea from the canteens we'd found. "'Cept now we're trying to break in."

I knew exactly what he meant. The towering walls were a little too close for comfort. "The walls do." I nodded and offered him the sandwich box. "But everything else is kind of the opposite."

The Walls themselves took up most of our skyline on the left as we sat on the railing of the Berg's retractable balcony deck to eat a late lunch, but if you looked past the airport settling into rigour mortis around us, the green-brown landscape with its wispy trees stretched out flat almost as far as you could see, before it crashed into the slopes of the mountain ranges, off which all the snow had melted long ago. We could just about make out the skeleton of a ghostly, redundant ski-lift on the nearest one.

"Isn't it strange-" I wondered aloud. "- we hated the Maze because we were closed in. There was nowhere to go. But here, there's everywhere to go. You could keep walking and never get to anything that would stop you - and somehow, that's just as scary."

Newt nodded, swinging his legs back and forth over the railing as he thought about an answer. After a couple of seconds he replied. "I think I've got it. Aside from being trapped in a stone prison until we croaked, the Maze was bloody terrifying 'cause of the uncertainty, I reckon - 's the same as being scared of the dark. You're scared of the dark 'cause anything could come at ya', all your worst nightmares are possible, ya' know?"

That was certainly true - why didn't everyone leave the Glade the night we escaped? They were frightened that whatever was outside it might be worse than any fate we would suffer in there.

"But, here-" He carried on, encompassing our surroundings into one sweeping gesture. "There is no uncertainty. You can see for bloody miles and if anything's coming for ya', then you'd know - but that sort of means there's no possibilities either. If you're alone, you're alone. If you can't fend off what's coming at ya', then you've lost, before they've even got to you. You've just got the certainty of death while you wait. And that's pretty shucking scary."

  
  


Newt paused, taking a deep breath. "Did that make any buggin' sense, or was I rambling?"

"No, I think you're right, actually." I tossed my canteen back into the belly of the Berg and leaned into Newt's shoulder. "It's not very happy though. All it makes me think is as soon as we all get back tomorrow, we need to get the hell out of here. Find some place that isn't scary at all, some place we can do something good. Like you said, remember? Where we don't have to keep sticking splitting up all the time."

Newt nodded slowly, his eyes on the mountain ranges and the ski-lift carcass. At the time, I didn't know what he was thinking. Now, I think I could guess.

"Yeah. But I'm glad we're not prisoners, ya' know? If I'm gonna die, I'd rather die free. I mean - this place is bloody weird, but at least it's real."

And without any warning at all, Newt threw himself off the railing of the Berg down into the dust and the concrete below. I jumped back down to the deck with a cry of panic, fear shooting through my chest as he hit the ground and rolled a couple of times before stumbling to his feet and smiling up at me, already on the stairs to follow him. My face must have shown my unbridled horror because Newt laughed and shook his head as I said, in what can only have been a squeak:

"What the sticking hell was that, Newt?! You could've broken something - are you okay?"

"But I didn't." He spread his arms wide, as if to show me that his newfound nihilism had done no harm. "And, bloody hell, I'm not sure I care all that much if I do."

I sat back down - on the deck this time - hanging my legs over the edge of the balcony and sighed, ruffling his hair and pushing him so he stumbled back, still chuckling at me. "You might not, but I care."

Newt came a bit closer again to ruffle my hair in return and lean on the railing next to me. "Well, I've got you to sort me out, haven't I? Therefore, not worried."

He disappeared again, bending down out of my sight round the other side of the Berg to retrieve whatever it was that caught his attention in the first place. When he came back up again, one of his hands was behind his back.

"Up ya' get, Lilybird."

In some contortionist act, Newt kept one arm hidden behind him as he swung himself up and rolled back onto the canopy, flapping at me to step back. When I'd got back to my feet, Newt tossed his hair out of his eyes and cleared his throat dramatically, like an actor about to give his closing monologue before a captive audience.

"My Lady." He began. "In our journey through this dust bowl of a planet, I have yet to encounter anything or anyone even vaguely equal to your beauty or value-"

I snorted with laughter, counteracting his 'lady' assessment almost immediately. "N-"

"No interruptions, I'm tryin' to serenade ya'." Newt raised his eyebrows in an expression of general reproach. "Ahem. I have yet to encounter anything to equal you in any facet of character - you outstrip all praise. However, upon approaching this den of horror-"

He pointed to the walls of Denver beyond the airport control towers. "-I caught sight of a fragment of beauty, which I have braved the choking dusts and the sharp rockfalls of these Denverian plains to retrieve."

Newt rolled his sleeve up to show me the graze that the gravel below the Berg had torn into his shoulder. "Gaze upon my grievous wounds, my lady. Fear not, I shall not die. But, allow me to present this gift to ya' as a token of my undying devotion."

He gave a sweeping bow and, with a flourish that must have hurt his shoulder, he presented a single yellow moss-rose, it's petals spread out wide, revealing the darker circle of gold just inside them. It was slightly ragged, a couple of its petals thin, and others missing completely, but to someone who hadn't touched - hadn't even seen - a real flower for at least four years, it really was a fragment of magic, however dramatic Newt was trying to be when he said it. I played along, reaching out to take it, covering his hand with mine and trying to curtsey without falling over, which just made him splutter.

"My good sir, that is a very generous gift. I greatly appreciate the trials you undertook to retrieve it and gratefully accept both your gift and your devotion."

Newt smiled and, rather than handing me the yellow moss-rose, pushed it into my braid just above my left ear, careful not to split the stem as he worked it between the strands. "There. Perfect."

I pushed up onto my tiptoes to hold his face and kiss him softly. He leaned into the kiss, one hand moving round to the back of my neck to pull me closer.

"Thank you." I whispered when I stepped back, slightly breathless.

"The pleasure's mine, m'lady." A grimace replaced his smile. "Ugh, that was more farmhand."

"Where did all that come from, anyway?"

"I don't know - my inner poet? Shakespeare's probably turnin' in his grave."

We both laughed as we picked up the cutlery and the litter from lunch, sorting it back into bags.

"Right." Newt ran his fingers through his hair with a sigh, the game over. "Let's go calibrate Jorge's navigating system before it starts gettin' dark."

It was only as we made our way back inside that he suddenly said. "Wait - do I get any devotion? It's a pretty big graze, ya' know, Lil?"

"However much you want."

"Undying devotion?"

"Undying devotion, you romantic stick."

It's ironic, really that - after everything we did at WICKED, all the madness there that defied explanation in every sense - that day on the Berg is one that stands out to me as strange. Newt and I drank tea, calibrated the navigation system, took the inventory, sorted the commune, washed the clothes we'd discarded the day before, did tiny task after tiny task on the Berg and talked for nearly every minute. We talked about anything and everything - from dogs to lizard conspiracy theories, from space to the underworld, imagining pasts and speculating presents as we washed and calibrated and scribbled and sorted.

It was almost like we'd snatched a moment in time where we were totally separate from the rest of the world; we were in a metal bubble where WICKED, the Scorch and the Flare couldn't touch us, didn't even exist - at least until Newt tripped over something because his vision was swimming or had to take yet another painkiller, and I had to change the drug we were using because he was up to maximum dosage after six hours, scouring the medical guides to check the drugs wouldn't start reacting in his system. "I'm fine, I'm fine" was what he kept saying - I'm not sure who he was trying to convince.

By the time we'd finished Jorge's list of upkeep duties, the light was fading outside. The moss-rose was sitting in a jam jar on the windowsill and I was in the kitchenette area of the Berg trying to throw dinner together out of the tins from the storage cupboard, when a terrific bang and a clattering crash sounded from the bedroom area followed by a howl of pain that tugged on something deep in my chest. The pan I was holding fell out of my hands onto the tabletop, adding to the cacophony, terror lending me speed as I ran into the bedroom.

Newt was standing in the centre of the room, utterly motionless, blood streaming over the fingers he had pressed to a wound a couple of centimetres above his left eye. It wasn't long, no more than three or four centimetres, but head wounds bleed like hell and his fingers didn't seem to be helping; the blood was running into his eye and down the side of his face, dying his dark blonde hair and the collar of his shirt a deep crimson that spread, almost black, as I stood frozen in the doorway. Oh god, oh god, oh god. It was a matter of milliseconds before I sprung into action, pulling one of the first aid kits down from the shelf and throwing it open, shouting back as I did.

"N, you've got to press on it hard! Put pressure on it, or it'll keep bleeding!"

I spun around, tossing the supplies onto the nearest couch. Newt hadn't moved. His brown eyes were wide and distant, as if whatever he was seeing wasn't in my line of sight - it was somewhere deep inside his head, somewhere I could never reach - and his gaze never wavered. His whole body was rigid, except for the fingers that blood was still seeping through, which were shaking uncontrollably, sending even more rivulets of blood running across his face.

"Newt, you need to press down!" My voice was getting lost in the roar that was building in his head, if he could even hear me at all. Damn. We'd had enough accidents in the Glade for me to know he was losing a lot of blood, far too quickly, and (proving my point) Newt started to sway back and forth, pale under the bloodstains. I had to sort this on my own - he couldn't help me.

"Come on then." I took his hand, bracing his arm against mine as a support, trying to keep my voice steady in case he could hear me. "Sit down or you'll fall down, buster."

As soon as I touched him, Newt grabbed my arm in a vice-like grip, like someone drowning, though he didn't seem to be any more aware of what was going on. I led him back to the couch as quickly as I could, blood splattering onto my clothes now too. Barely even thinking beyond Medic protocol, I picked up a towel and pressed it to the wound, gently moving his shaking fingers out of the way and waiting for the bleeding to slow up. He hissed at the contact, but his eyes stayed vacant, not acknowledging but not stopping me either.

How did he do it? My eyes roamed around the small room, as I held the towel in place, looking for any kind of explanation. All that was in the room was a series of couches, a sink, a small table and a cupboard. Ah. The padlocked cupboard was at head height, made of iron and the edge closest to us looked sharp enough, if you applied enough force, and the crash I'd heard sounded like Newt had done that somehow.

But, why?

I couldn't work it out as I sat there, the spread of the bloodstain gradually slowing on the towel, but perhaps that was because I was so frightened of the answer.

After a couple of minutes, I pulled the towel away from Newt's head, inspecting the wound. It didn't look too deep, but it would probably scar - I'd have to find one of those knitting bandages. The first aid kit had an antiseptic solution in it, and I pulled out the bottle and sat back down in front of Newt.

"I'm sorry, N - this might sting a bit." I told him.

He didn't reply, but he'd taken his hands away from his head and moved them into his lap. His gaze hadn't shifted and the shaking was spreading from his hands up his arms and torso - I had to put one of my hands on his shoulders to steady him as I carefully cleaned the gash, not letting myself think about anything but the grains of dirt and strands of hair that had fallen into it. There was still dust caught in his hair from his jump to find my moss-rose. How had everything changed so quickly? Suddenly, as I dipped the cotton bud back into the antiseptic bottle for the tenth time, Newt murmured something, so low I didn't catch it.

"What?"

"Why did I do that?" His voice was barely above a whisper and his eyes were fixed on the floor, now. "Why did I do that?"

He brought his hands up from his lap to his face, to cover his eyes, but flinched back to avoid touching the cut. "Why did I do that?"

I wasn't even certain he was talking to me as I tried to formulate some kind of answer. "I don't-"

"Why did I do that, Lily?" Newt grabbed my arm then and looked up into my face, some part of his soul jolting back into his body. His expression wasn't exactly focused, but there was no question that he could see me now, his eyes filling with a horror that turned to open fear as he took in the room, the bloodied towel and the contents of the first aid kit scattered across the carpet. My heart ached at the childlike confusion on his face and the question that I couldn't possibly answer.

"I don't know." I kept my eyes on his, softening my voice and rubbing his shoulders. "But it's okay. You're okay. It's not that bad - I've just got to clean it, okay?"

Newt nodded, settling back down onto the sofa, twisting his shaking fingers around each other. Gradually, as I alternated between antiseptic and water on the cut, keeping the fingers of my free hand in his hair, rubbing the back of his neck with my thumb in an attempt to bring him back to himself, Newt started breathing in controlled cycles, and the shaking eventually stopped and he sat still - except for the occasional gasp and flinch backwards when I hit something that stung.

I kept talking, telling him about the strange birds that had landed on the telephone wires outside the Berg, about the few guards carrying out some kind of drill at the top of Denver's walls, making up things about the ski-lift in the distance, wondering what snow would look like - anything and everything again, but for desperate distraction this time.

"I'm sorry." He said eventually, as I unwrapped one of WICKEDs high-tech bandages that knit the tissue and gently pressed it against the skin above his left eye. His voice was quiet but steadier than it had been - it was his voice.

"Sorry nothing, N. Don't be sorry - what happened?"

Newt shuffled backwards a bit so that he was facing me rather than the wall, pulling one of his knees up to his chest. "I...ya' know...I'm not even bloody sure. I was moving all of the papers in here, 'cause Min left 'em all over the shop and my head was aching like a mother...but I looked at the clock, and I know that the tablets say every four hours, which is what?"

He glanced at the digital clock on the wall. "An hour? So I didn't do anythin' about it. The last thing I really remember is hearing you clattering around with the pans in the kitchen, and thinkin' about how it's so bloody annoying that my head can itch and burn at the same time. Next thing I knew, I was standing by that cupboard with blood all over me."

Newt shot me a rueful look as he took in my streaked t-shirt. "And you too, now. Sorry."

"It's okay. It'll wash out." He nodded, reaching up and gingerly running his fingers around the edge of the bandage.

"I can't feel anythin' now.' Newt said, biting his lip. "It just hurt so much, Lil. Maybe I thought that would stop it?"

And for the millionth time in the last month alone, I despised WICKED so much it was almost a physical thing, burning in my throat. They'd kept the Flare from all of the non-Immune candidates for nearly half a decade. They had the power to protect them, but instead, they'd injected a group of teenagers with this hellish, incurable disease just to see what would happen.

"Ah, I don't buggin' know. " Newt sighed and looked up at me again, head to toe this time. "Crikey. I really have ruined your shirt, haven't I?"

I looked down at my top, which used to be white. Now it looked like someone had taken a scarlet paintbrush to my chest, red smears across the middle and splatters surrounding them. I hadn't even noticed. But then I considered his, which looked like the artist had given up on the paintbrush entirely and just dipped the neck and the left side of the shirt in the paint - as did his hair, now I considered it.

"Mine's fine - look at yours! Do you wanna wash your hair?"

"Er-" He looked worried for a second, not trusting his own mind in the showers on the other side of the Berg. "In here? Yeah. That sink works, right?"

Newt disappeared for a second into the commune area to find the soap and I dug some spare shirts out of the dryer and switched mine, throwing the other to Newt when he walked back in. He stuck his head under the tap, washing the worst of the blood out with the soap he'd found, then changed his own shirt, sitting back down at my side.

"Pass me that towel, I'll dry it." I said. Newt passed me a fresh towel and gave me a slight smile.

"Thank you." He replied. "See - I wasn't lyin' earlier, Lilby. I've got you to sort me out. I'm okay."

I rolled my eyes and started separating his hair into sections and drying it in circular motions. "Alright, cheeseball - gosh, N, you've got more hair than me."

"Yeah-" He dragged the syllable out, like he'd explained this a million times, and leant his head further back into the towel, closing his eyes. "Mmm, that's nice. You're an angel. In the Glade, I just never had time. The guys who shaved their heads, like Alby-"

The shadow that always crossed his face when he talked about his friend appeared momentarily. "He had to take minutes out every day to shave his head. That adds up - I had stuff to do - obeyin' all his orders and the like."

He smiled at some memory of the said orders. "It was just easier - it wasn't a buggin' fashion statement, whatever Min wants to tell ya'."

"I could teach you to braid it, if you like?" I offered and Newt snorted.

"Nah, I'm good, thanks." He opened one eye for a second. "Don't think I'd look as pretty as you."

Now the adrenaline was wearing off, I realised that my own hands had started shaking as I twisted the towel back and forth and a wave of nausea crashed through my body. Everything with Newt in those days was like walking on a knife edge, or trapped in a near constant game of Russian roulette - no matter how good things seemed, something could throw everything out of balance in a second and something or someone got broken. And if that's what I was feeling, as an Immune around one infected person I loved, I didn't want to imagine how he felt - how millions of people around the world had already felt. Yes, whispered a quiet voice from behind the door I'd locked in my mind against any imagination - the panic must have let a bolt slip loose - but he isn't going to get better. Surely it can only get worse from here? Surely he's going to- Shut up. Stop. Stop thinking. But I was tired, and the voices had been getting louder all day.

"Could you hear me?" I asked suddenly.

"What?" Newt opened his eyes again. "When?"

"When you did it - it just didn't look like you could."

He frowned and sat up again, shoulder to shoulder with me. "Yeah. I could. But it was kinda like being underwater. It was like you were a long way away - I heard about four words in ten."

"Has that happened before?"

"No..." He was biting his nails now rather than his lip. "Not like that. You know. You've seen me...zone out, I guess. But that's just like daydreamin', 'cept I can't control it. Once you say my name, I'm back. But that didn't happen then..."

Newt reached out, pulling me against him, and I leaned my head on his shoulder and said: "We don't have to talk about this if you don't want to."

"No." I felt his sigh. "I should, I 'spose. No use in bottling it all. No use in anything to do with the shucking thing. Not like I can do anythin' about it."

Another deep breath. "It comes and goes in waves. I don't get to pick when, it just happens. I can try and push it back, like when we started that meeting yesterday, and it'll shut up for a while, but then it just comes back later, ten times buggin' worse."

Both of our eyes drifted to the hole in the plaster on the opposite wall, a reminder of what happened at the end of yesterday's meeting.

"As ya' know. But, I can't feel it all the time. Except the headache - that's always bloody there. Just enough to make things grate on me. Things that wouldn't before - you know, that probably annoys me the most."

"Why?"

"Because I can deal with the headaches, most of the time, even though it's like a power drill inside your skull. I can deal with the voices and the weird colours in my head, but that's not me. I never fight with Min - I just don't, no matter what shuck sarcasm comes out of his mouth. I've never fought with Tommy either. But all of a sudden, I'm the buggin' hothead? I hate that."

"They know it's not your fault." I said, drawing slow patterns on the back of his hand with my finger. "They know it isn't you. Nobody's going to blame you."

"I know. But that doesn't really make it okay. It's still stuff I've said, isn't it? When I'm a slinthead to you guys, it's still stuff that's come out of my head."

"Technically. But that's like blaming the guy that built the control room for some random breaking in and firing all the cannons. If you think about it, all of us have got a hell of a lot of stuff in our heads that other people put there - the way we've been taught to think, opinions that life hasn't proved wrong yet-"

"Microchips, if you're WICKED." Newt added drily.

"Exactly! All this crap can't make you a bad person, Newt. Not everything in your head comes from your heart. It's just that, right now, you're saying both sometimes." I offered him the best smile I could manage from a 45 degree angle. The voice's warning scraped in the back of my head again and I felt a strange pressure building in my chest. I had to make him understand this, and I had to try to understand him. There wasn't time for anything less. "And the people that matter are always gonna know the difference."

Newt didn't say anything for a few seconds, but I could feel every breath he was taking. Then he said: "For a 'cheeseball' answer, that was a bloody good metaphor, Lilybird. I'll remember that next time."

Next time. "Can you tell?" I asked. "When it's going to happen?"

Newt leant back, pulling me with him so we were both resting against the back of the couch.

"Sometimes. Sometimes the pressure gets worse. Sometimes I feel sick. Sometimes it's just like a scratching at the back of my head. But...as soon as I think I understand it, as soon as I think I have a grip on the sodding thing, it seems to - I don't know - mutate. Get worse, somehow. Like today. I wasn't doing anythin' when it went, 'well, let's slam his head into this shucking cupboard.' I guess, I can tell when the easy stuff's going to happen. But every time it gets worse - every time some new bit of my stupid brain decides to pack up - and it hits me with some psycho moment like this one-"

Newt gestured to his bandage. "No. I can't tell...don't know if I'd want to, to be honest. Unless it gave me time to lock myself up somewhere."

What can you say to that? A declaration of utter helplessness - of self-hatred. Self-fear. Nothing. Instead, I laced my fingers through Newt's, squeezing hard. I'm here. All you can do is be there - make sure that person knows they're not the sole occupant of some demonic black hole in their brains.

Yet.

And, with that whisper from the cruel voice, the locks on my imagination splintered and the door crashed open. The pressure on my chest started to burn and I could hear Timmy's damning words on the bus: "I'd rather shoot myself than get it...it shuts down everything that makes people human. 'S more than not recognising the people they love - they'll go for 'em, rip their throats out if they can manage it."

No. No. I don't believe you.

The man with his weeping sores, screaming and screaming: "Nobody gets to hide, no fun, no fun, no fun." The man with the gash he'd torn in his forehead on the handle of the doors, the blood streaming down his cracked face, getting in his eyes and his mouth and on his clothes - Newt, shaking, blood in his hair, in his eyes, 'why did I do that? Why did I do that, Lily?"

No. Stop thinking. Stop. But I couldn't. And for all of my fighting to protect N, to keep him talking, to stop his pain, I suddenly found myself crying, the tears coursing down my cheeks as I pressed the back of my hand to my mouth in an effort to force this sudden outburst back.

Newt noticed immediately and, murmuring "no, no, no, love", reached even further across and gathered me up - the way you would with a child - pulling me into his lap and wrapped his arms around me, folding me against his chest. I didn't resist, trying to force the grotesque parade of images back behind the door, just muttering something about "This is so stupid...sorry, sorry. I just-" He shook his head, stroking my hair and echoing my words from only a few minutes before.

"It's okay. I'm okay." Newt kissed the top of my head. "Don't cry over me, ya' noodle. It's not very gentlemanly to make ladies cry, ya' know. I'm sure my Ma'd be bloody ashamed."

For a few minutes, I let him hold me, resting my head against his chest, where I could feel the beating of his heart through his t-shirt as I wrestled all the bolts in my head back into place and got my breathing under control. Then I uncurled myself from the ball I'd made and hugged him back, as hard as I could.

"This is all backwards, N." I mumbled into his shirt and he just laughed, shaking his head. He was stroking my hair again, twisting it into tiny spirals when he suddenly said.

"Hey, Lil?" There was such a different tone to his voice that I looked up and leaned back in his lap.

"Yes?" Rather than answering straight away, Newt gently shifted me off his lap and spun into a standing position, offering me his hand instead.

"Do you wanna dance?"

"What - now?"

"Why not?" The crooked grin was back, his expression playful. Looking back, that was the closest he came to the boy from before the Maze, if you could have ever called him that. A lightbulb, that sparked with no warning at all.

I laughed, shrugging. "There's no music!"

He tilted his head to one side, like he was pretending to consider it. "And your point is?"

I didn't have an answer for that. I gave him my hand and he spun me to my feet too, pulling me in and resting his other hand on my waist, directing mine to his shoulder. "Like that, ya' see?"

"I see."

Now, I'd rather hoped that the memory we'd shared about the dance had been an exaggeration regarding my dancing skills. I'm sad to say it wasn't. We waltzed across the cluttered bedroom, Newt deftly dodging the feet of the chairs, me falling over virtually every one as well as Newt's feet, both of us laughing at the sheer madness of what we were doing - waltzing to nothing around a stolen WICKED Berg in Middle of Nowhere, Denver as the cloud dissipated in front of the stars, clinging onto that feeling of isolation from everything outside that had shattered with Newt's episode. Moonwalking through the kitchen took some effort, considering the tables and the pans I'd left on the tiles, but we made it out into the corridor after some excellent hopscotch imitations and a lot of banging around.

There were no strip lights in the corridor, only the occasional bulb, but when I went to flip them on, Newt caught my hand.

"Don't. We don't need 'em." He nodded to the circular windows that stretched all the way down the passage. The corridor was lit up by the moonlight that streamed through them in cylindrical shafts, and if you looked up, you could make out the constellations that had eventually burned off the clouds over Denver.

"Go on." He gestured with his free hand down the passage, his expression expectant. I frowned, wrinkling my nose at him.

"What am I doing?"

Newt shook his head, like he couldn't believe it wasn't my first thought. "Just bloody spin. Moonlight, Lil - it's buggin' criminal not to."

My spinning had not been the most graceful back in the bedroom, but I sighed and stretched my arms out and started spinning through the shafts of light as he watched me, keeping up . The walls whirled as I made my way uncertainly along the carpet, laughing and flickering in and out of the patches of starlight that lit my face for seconds at time. As the door to the bedroom got closer and closer again, I felt my head spinning faster than my body, and, when I reached the last window, my feet caught together and I tripped, expecting to end up sprawling on the carpet. Instead, Newt's arms were there, catching me before I could slam into the nearest wall.

"What a stereotypical save, Newton. Nicely done." I said as I got my breath back. Newt nodded, but kept hold of my wrists with a grin, his eyes shining.

"We aim to please, ma'am."

Newt leaned down, bumping his forehead against mine and kissing me gently, sending a warm feeling skittering through me and making the fear of the last hour blur a little around the edges. Pulling back slightly, I murmured into his ear:

"That's one way of doing it."

Newt laughed and kissed me again, letting go of my wrists to cradle my face with one hand, the other moving to my back, holding me to him. I relaxed into him, reaching up to anchor myself, linking my fingers behind his head as we kissed, the warmth settling in my chest and spreading out through my limbs. Our height difference meant that my balance was wavering and I took an automatic step towards him, but my eyes were closed and I stumbled over his feet again, coming even closer to grazing the carpet.

"You're going to tread on my toes now, too?" Newt asked, arching an eyebrow. I shook my head with a laugh that was more of an outward breath.

"I guess-" He said, breaking off to steal another kiss, his hands moving down to my waist. "-I'll just have to carry ya' again."

The last time Newt had carried me was years ago in a ballroom, spinning across a dance floor peppered with projected stars. This time was nothing like that - not least because tonight, the stars were real. This time, Newt lifted me up, his grip tight on my hips and I wrapped my legs around his waist, locking my arms even tighter around his neck. Careful of his bandage, I gently leant my forehead against his and whispered:

"So this is what it looks like up here..."

Newt barked a laugh, mirroring my grin. "It's probably a whole lot better for my back, bein' honest. Let's see, shall we?"

"Okay."

I brushed his hair back from his face and kissed him this time, a new feeling of control stemming from being higher than he was. My hands drifted to the sides of Newt's face, my thumbs brushing his cheekbones. This was soft, and it felt safe and right, like he always did - and safer than you'd think considering the position - but there was something else now, something that went deeper than that. I'd felt secure, comfortable tens of different times, but I'd never felt this inexorable pull to be closer to Newt, closer than standing together, closer than this.

Considering the symbolic meaning that teen romances seem to give to somebody opening their mouth during a kiss, it's pretty hard to avoid. As we kissed, clumsy and slow, my teeth caught on Newt's bottom lip and I heard his sharp intake of breath. The warmth I'd felt at first was building into a heat in my chest and I caught his lip again, deliberately now, and bit it gently - not entirely sure if this was stupid, if he'd laugh rather than feeling whatever I hoped he would feel. But, in response, his grip tightened on my waist, as if he wanted to pull me further into him, and he groaned quietly.

"Ah, you'll be the death of me, love."

Newt started to walk backwards into the bedroom, carrying me with him. I'd never noticed the freckles scattered from his jaw to his collarbone before and I leant down to kiss the path from his jaw to the collar of his shirt, my lips just brushing his skin. I felt his chuckle and he made it easier for me, sitting down on the nearest couch and leaning back, stretching his chin up to give me better access. As I traced the path across his skin, I felt his fingers at the back of my neck, pulling out the hair tie and running through my hair, unwinding my braid as he went - something always made my scalp ache, but that night I didn't care. The feeling just mingled with the myriad of feelings everywhere else in my body, disappearing as Newt eventually cupped my chin and pulled my lips back up to his.

When I was young, long before my first kiss, despite all the books I read, I'd never realised that kissing the same person could ever be different. Kissing was kissing, wasn't it? No. There was kissing in a crowded room, so quickly you could blink and miss it, kissing for the first time, nervous and unsure, kissing for affection, because it's nice and then there was this. There was this.

It was clumsy - noses rubbing, foreheads bumping, frenetic and disorganised - but that didn't matter. I'd wondered fleetingly what Karly would think of me kissing Newt like this, in his lap, running my fingers through his hair (which was surprisingly soft and far less tangled than mine felt) before all lingering thoughts of anybody but him evaporated completely. For as long as either of us could remember, even in dreams, we'd never been in a place where there was absolutely nobody around - no chance that a door would crash open or an alarm would blare. We had time. For a while. And I could think of worse ways to spend it.

Maybe it was what there was a chance of, more than a chance, that drove every caress that night, the kisses it still felt like we were stealing. I wish it hadn't been something worse WICKED that we were stealing from. But I wasn't thinking about that then. The voices behind the door in my mind, the nails they'd been scraping down it all day, had fallen away into the feeling of his fingers in my hair, his lips warm on mine. I'm not sure either of us was thinking anything - other than the desire to stretch the flying seconds into minutes, to be closer, as close as possible to the other person while they were still within touching distance. Maybe it was that.

Something sharp dug into my breastbone, making me slide a little further back on Newt's legs and open my eyes blearily - his shirt had buttons. Gently, so gently I was barely touching him, I traced the line my lips had followed earlier with my fingertips from his jaw to his collar through his freckles - it reminded me bizarrely of a dot-to-dot puzzle - while he watched me, his expression faintly questioning. It was only when I reached the first button and let my fingers rest on it for a few seconds before undoing it and continuing the puzzle across the centimetres of skin below, that his breath hitched in his throat and he understood. Slowly, keeping my eyes on his, checking this was okay, I undid the one below it. There were only three and Newt clearly decided the third was superfluous by then, leaning back and pulling his shirt up over his head himself, tossing it aside.

It was at this point that I didn't know what to do. I hadn't thought past getting rid of his shirt and the buttons attached - and rather stupidly, I hadn't thought about the fact that he wouldn't be wearing anything under said shirt. As I've already said, Newt had always been tall, and nineteen-year-old N was no exception. He always joked that his limbs were too long for his body, and somehow all of that - combined with Minho's frequent emphasis on his own impressive physique - had made me gloss over how easily Newt had swung me up into his arms, the two years he had spent as the fastest Runner in the Glade, the months he'd spent working even after that. His muscles didn't bulge through layers of clothing, not like Min made sure his did (and still does), but without those layers, the muscles of Newt's arms, his chest, his back were defined in smooth curves, interrupted occasionally by scars - some white and old, others recent and raw.

"Well?" Newt was smiling at me, his eyes almost copper as I sat curled on his legs, just looking at the human being in front of me. There was a lot about him that was beautiful. "Do I pass?"

To finish the puzzle, I followed the shape of one scar across his chest to his hipbone with a fingertip and smiled right back.

"You'll do."

He tugged on my hand again. "C'mere."

And that was different again. The lights on the timer in the kitchen had come on, casting shadows across the bedroom walls and reminding us that this evening could never be infinite. Before, Newt had wrapped his arms around my back, like I'd disappear if he let go for even a second, but now his fingertips were light in my hair, brushing my cheek, like I was glass or a sugarwork masterpiece that dissolves against your lips. I think it would have taken both of us more effort to open our eyes again, but I caught Newt's hand the next time he brushed my hair back and held onto it, running my thumb over his palm, my other hand resting against his jaw this time. I'm here, you're okay. We're okay.

That day is a day I go back to a lot; when I want to smile, when I want to hope, when I don't want to be as alone as I feel. Despite everything, it was a good day - and in those years, good days were like finding silver in a coal mine. And that moment felt almost mad, a psychedelic moment where we both lost our minds for a while in a stolen Berg on an abandoned airfield. We'd never said love after the Maze - no number of dreams or feelings had seemed to justify the word in twenty six days - but right then we didn't need to.

Somehow, through the mist clouding my brain just then, I suddenly realised that there was something on my fingers, warm and thick, and - tired or not - my eyes flew open, Newt sitting back at the same time that I did. What? The tips of my fingers were stained the same crimson that Newt's had been and, when I looked up at him, slow drops of blood were running down the side of his face, catching in his eyebrow, his bandage ripped a little at the corner. Newt put his own fingers up to his forehead, pulled them away and grimaced.

There was a moment of silence, where we just looked at the blood and then back up at each other. As soon as we met each other's eyes, the bizarreness of the moment hit us and I couldn't stop the sudden laughter that bubbled up in my throat. Neither could N, though he tried harder than me, pressing his lips together into a smirk for a second before giving in entirely, both of us giggling like hyenas, our laughter echoing off the metal walls as the rest of the lights flicked on in WICKED's renegade machine.

"Do you think the others are done yet?" I asked, yawning, curled up in the window of the Berg as I watched the patrol lights of Denver swing around the sky.

Newt quickly passed me the other mug of tea and mirrored my yawn, collapsing onto the far end of the couch and stretching his legs across it. "Bloody hope so. It's late - don't wanna think about the mood Min'll be in tomorrow if they're not."

"I hope they're okay."

"Me too." Newt frowned for a second, the concern obvious before he masked it with a smile. "Don't really want to have to take Denver down from the outside, bein' honest."

He tipped his head back against the sofa arm and closed his eyes. Scrambling down from the windowsill and pushing his feet back to sit on the other end of the sofa, I noticed one particular scar that seared a puckered diagonal line from the right side of Newt's chest to his collarbone.

"How did you get that one?" Newt opened his eyes and looked down at the various marks on his body, pointing at different ones until I nodded.

"Ah, this one?" He chuckled softly at the memory. "Another one of my not-so-glamorous moments. It was about a month after I'd jacked up my leg, I'd just started getting around again. Nick - he was the leader at the time - realised in the end that I'd go barmy if didn't have somethin' worthwhile to do and sorted me out with the kind of second-in-command job, under Alby. But, before that, he tried to do what you'd do with a buggin' Newbie, putting me with the other Keepers one day each and tryin' to find me a new spot. This one was with the Builders - do you remember me tellin' ya about Gally?"

Gally. The Glade rebel who'd vanished twice. Their Beth. "Yes."

Newt shook his head. "The crazy shank always hated me after he got stung - probably why this happened, now I think about it. They were fixing the roof of the Homestead, 'cause we'd got some new materials up in the Box. So, I was up there with them-"

"On crutches?" I said, disbelief saturating my voice. Newt laughed.

"No! Don't be daft - left those on the ground."

"Newt!"

"Anyway!" He made his tone louder than my protests, the smile still on his face. "I was up there, carrying some boards to Jackson and my leg buckled. I put my foot through a weak bit of scaffolding and fell off the bloody thing. Don't look at me like that, it was fine. Couple of bruises and this thing - caught a piece of metal on the way down."

"Bet the Medics loved you." I rolled my eyes, looking at the fresh bandage I'd practically glued to his forehead.

"Clint's a bloody good friend of mine." Another smirk. "Gally wasn't quite as impressed. He thought I was a blithering idiot and sent me back to Nick 'soon as Clint'd patched me up. You can imagine how excited he was when I got promoted above him."

I'd heard the story of the disastrous Gathering when Alby was ill from more than one Glader and I nodded. "Weird guy...I wonder what he saw in the Changing?"

"No idea." Newt said. "He wouldn't talk to me, to anyone. Whatever it was was worse than anything going on in there."

Later - I'd completely lost track of how much later - we'd both squashed onto the same side of the couch and stolen a blanket from the other room. I was so tired by now, I was barely conscious. I'd been drifting in and out of sleep for some indefinite length of time, the sound of the Berg machinery, Newt breathing and the wind wailing outside acting as white noise that lulled me in and out of sleep. This time, when I opened my eyes, some of the lights had turned off in the bedroom and the kitchen was dark - the Berg had switched to Night Mode. I was lying down, my head against the sofa cushion, but Newt was sitting up, just like he had been that night in the WICKED Centre, staring out of the window at the foot of the couch, his eyes following the patrol light beams. I wondered if he'd really slept at all since we left WICKED, or if the dreams he had made it easier to be awake. As I watched, Newt sighed quietly and rubbed his temples with his fingertips, a grimace of discomfort on his face, before settling back into the statue position - leaning against the backrest, one arm stretched across it, his dark eyes focused on the horizon.

"You okay?" I whispered, because I couldn't think of a way of phrasing it that sounded less idiotic. Newt gasped a little, not expecting me to be awake, but he turned his eyes away from the window. Before, he had answered my unspoken question with instant affirmation, reassurance, but he didn't do that then. Instead, Newt shook his head very slowly, like maybe the idea was only just solidifying in his own mind. The frown hadn't left his face. He met my eyes and I saw what he told me anyway, his voice not much more than the sigh that preceded it, as if whatever was out there would hear him if he spoke any louder.

"I'm scared, Lily."

That remains one of the saddest fragments of language I've ever heard, and I still have days where it plays on repeat. On hearing it the first time, my heart twisted in my chest, like something was wringing the chambers inside out. My answer couldn't change, because there wasn't an answer but I rested my hand on his knee and I answered anyway.

"I'm right here."

A ghost of a smile as he laid his hand on top of mine, linking the fingers. Newt sighed again, his whole body moving with it, but then his expression suddenly cleared and he nodded, just as slowly.

"So am I."

Another time that could have been minutes or hours later, where I couldn't even open my eyes - I felt Newt shift beside me, squashing back down into the space by my side, but I didn't hear him lie down and his breathing stayed shallow, rather than the deep, even breaths of someone falling asleep. I felt the way you sometimes do when it's early morning and you're the last person asleep.

"Are you watching me sleep?" I asked.

"Yes."

"Okay."

Newt's fingertips brushed my hairline, running across the lines of my face as I laughed quietly but then let him. He traced my features, like he was trying to memorise a route from a complicated map, ghosting across my eyelashes and the shell of my ear, his touch so light I'm not sure I didn't start imagining it. I never heard him lie down, but eventually, his fingers moved to my hair again, twisting it around and brushing it back, stroking my hair until I fell so deeply asleep that I didn't wake 'til morning.

The Next Morning - 7:15am

"Are you sure you know where you're going?" Newt asked for the millionth time, standing on the end of the Berg ramp in the heat of the Denver sun as I shouldered my backpack, 'Lilianne Peterson's' files in hand.

"Yes! Second door on the right, Paperchase at the end of the mall. Stop worrying."

"But I'm so good at it." Newt whined, but gave in. "I know, I know. Come here then, Lilybird."

He pulled me into a tight hug, despite the enormous backpack, squeezing hard. He smelled of vanilla and the soap we'd found the night before, and I felt a sudden flash of concern myself at leaving him here. My mind went back to how I'd found him that morning, standing it front of the window like he'd been carved into place. Newt had never looked round as I got up, just kept his eyes fixed on the sky and I'd been about to reach up and tap his shoulder when he whispered to me, in a voice so close to his own, yet so different that I wanted to cry.

"Look, Lily." My name, but he didn't even look down as he said it, pointing up at the sky with a crooked smile. "There's a hole in the clouds."

Stop thinking. It's just a few hours. He'll be fine. Find the others.

"Are you sure you don't want me to come with you to the doors?" Newt offered as he stepped back, keeping one hand on my shoulder. And he would have done it too, if I'd asked, forget the risk of being captured or worse. I shook my head vehemently, though I'd much rather have been with him in the alien city.

"No, no. I'll be fine." I kissed his cheek and smiled. "I'll see you later, okay?"

He tried to mirror my smile. "See you later, Lily. Don't torch the city."

"I'll try. Don't mess with the spider-catcher."

"No, ma'am."

Newt leaned in one more time, kissing me quickly and managing his real smile. "Get on with ya' then, you buggin' criminal."

And when I left him, we were laughing, and - like Minho - I turned and waved as the ramp slid back up into the doors and sealed him behind it. Looking back, I realise how strange and cruel the circumstances were that morning. How normal. Just telling someone goodbye with a smile and coming back in the evening, like millions of people had done for decades without ever questioning it. It was a flash of what we'd always wanted.

So, there was everything the last twenty-four hours had been. But there was also this. There was kissing goodbye.


	30. Gunshots, Goodbyes and Girls with Lizards

**Chapter 30 - Gunshots, Goodbyes and Girls with Lizards**

**The Crank Palace - Two Days Later**

If you ask anyone about the government response to the Flare, the first thing you hear will be the Crank Palaces. They were one of the first responses when hopes of an antidote started to die, when governments realised they had to do something about the hordes of highly infectious people spreading through their cities. Now, they're nothing more than uninhabited relics, monuments to the suffering that the world endured, but there's been almost more debate about them than about the cure itself. When they first started to close, there were stories on the news every day about the atrocities that took place behind their walls - murders, conspiracies, kidnapping, even some mistaken identities. They were the kind of typical government creation that looked good on a board meeting PowerPoint, hitting the criteria of philanthropy, hygiene and economics in one and never once considering basic human emotions. Stuffing the infected into fabricated cities until they went crazy enough to be shipped off into the Scorch. The suited government bigwigs ticked their box, collected their six-figure salary and built institutions that descended into hotbeds of crime, dilapidation and despair. A well-meaning set-up turned toxic.

When the stories and the videos of the Palaces first broke, civilians everywhere were horrified that these dens of insanity were a worldwide phenomenon, but we were never surprised. Not after the day with Newt.

Walking through the Central Zone of the Denver Palace, accompanied by tired-looking Immune guards who were armed to the teeth, was almost like walking through a shopping centre. If you closed your eyes slightly, until everything blurred, you could convince yourself that this was a just a crowded mall where everything was a little too bright and a little too loud and a little worn around the edges. But then you open them again and you see the people. There were people everywhere, in almost every position you can imagine - most people were clustered in groups, some laughing, their bodies jerking in an exaggerated way, their smiles too wide. Others were crying or screaming - at other people or at thin air - their veins corded, faces red. One woman was standing underneath a skylight, her arms spread wide, spinning and spinning, a calm smile on her face, her eyes on the shifting clouds above her. Some people - usually neater, their clothes less threadbare - just looked terrified. I can't imagine what that must have felt like; being imprisoned, your only option watching hundreds of people lose their minds, tear themselves apart, knowing the virus that destroyed them is multiplying in your cells every second you stand there, eating through the membranes and dragging you closer and closer to the same precipice.

"I'm scared, Lily."

If Newt had been so frightened a couple of days before, having only seen a handful of Cranks in comparison...

I hated that we'd had to spend an extra night in Denver while Newt was alone on the Berg. I'd barely slept in the hostel - every clatter of the air conditioning or hum of a car made me jump, triggering a wave of nausea - and, despite Thomas falling asleep the second his head hit the pillow, one glance at Minho told me he hadn't fared much better. I'd never seen him bite his nails before that morning. Newt had left us a note saying thank you and goodbye. He'd told the guards to tell us to 'get lost'. Newt was someone I knew better than I knew my own name, someone who'd shown me as much of his soul as they universe had given him time to and vice versa, but right then, I didn't have the slightest clue what we were walking into. For the first time, none of us could predict the boy we'd known for half a decade. My imagination scraped sharpened nails down the inside of the locked doors, making me shiver. A fog of 'what if's were seeping out under them, clouding my brain and I clutched Karly's hand a little tighter.

We did our best to slip our way through the people weaving around a spluttering fountain in the square opposite the bowling alley, stepping over the debris - and the people - on the floor, and I felt a soft tap at my elbow, too hard to be accidental.

"Miss?" A little girl appeared next to me, no older than five or six. Her hair was deep brown, falling in corkscrew curls around her face, and there were a couple of scratches on her cheeks. The girl almost looked like any normal child you'd meet in a playground or a kindergarten, except for the black vein-like patterns spreading from her wrists to her elbows, searing across her ochre skin, a sure marker that the Flare had set in. But she's so little. The sight made my stomach turn. She didn't seem to be with anybody, but, if her parents were any of the people in this zone, I wasn't sure she was in any more danger on her own.

"Hello." The others had started to slow up anyway and I gave the girl my best smile. "Are you okay? Where are your parents?"

She either didn't hear me or didn't care, shaking her curls away from her face and revealing another scratch going up into her hairline. She pointed at my collarbone and gave me a wide smile, showing all of her teeth and some of the gaps in between.

"I've got a lizard. His name is Martin."

My lizard. Automatically, I reached up and ran my fingers over the carving. I bent down to her level and replied. "Do you?"

"Yep." The tiny girl nodded vigorously. "My Auntie has him. She's looking after him for me. 'Til I'm better."

There weren't many times that I felt any kind of affinity for WICKED, but talking to that tiny girl was one of them. There was no cure - this girl and thousands like her were going to die unless they found one, and quickly. My stomach twisted again and I wondered why she'd come over to us; did she do this to everyone who walked past the fountain? Was she bored? Or was she just sitting there waiting for something about somebody she could properly connect to?

"What's your name?" I asked.

"Lizzie. 'S why I had a lizard. Who are you?" She looked at me like I was obviously an idiot for not getting that straight off. I nodded quickly, showing her that obviously she was right.

"I'm Lily. That's Karly." I gestured behind me, but Lizzie never looked past me, her gaze fixed on my necklace.

"Lily." She said my name like she was rolling it around her tongue, tasting it. "What's your lizard called?"

I felt that my response was going to be a definite disappointment for any imaginative child. "Er...he doesn't have a name. He's got an 'N' on the back, though."

"Oh." Her face fell. "Everything has a name. He just hasn't told you it yet."

Karly touched my arm and a glance over my shoulder told me that the guards who brought us here were getting close to the bowling alley, where Newt had apparently made camp. I turned back to Lizzie and said:

"Would you like to hold him? Maybe he'll tell you."

Lizzie's eyes shone and she clapped her hands, nodding enthusiastically. I carefully untied my necklace, so the pendant fell into my hand. Keeping a tight hold of the leather strap, I held the carving out to the little girl. Her gaze flicked up to my face to make sure I meant it, and then, reverently, she traced the lines of the lizard with a fingertip and leant down to it until her ear brushed the wood.

"You know," I told her. "Touching the lizard always brings you good luck."

When Lizzie pulled back, there was a faraway look in her eyes, darker brown that Newt's or mine, and a delighted smile slowly spread across her delicate face.

"He told me! His name's Norbert."

Even in that government hellhole, that was enough to win a real smile from both me and Karly, and I was about to answer her when the bark of the guardsmen snapped me back to dismal reality.

"Hey! He's in there. Now pay up."

The sick feeling that had already welled in my stomach from the second the Berg touched the ground here spread up through my chest, paralysing me for a second. Newt was in that derelict hall. But which version of him?

I stood up slowly, as if my rucksack weighed a hundred pounds and nodded at the guard.

"We've got to go now, Lizzie." Her eyes had been on the guards too, but she turned back to me as I spoke. "Say hello to Martin for me."

The smile was back and she waved at the pendant I was fixing around my neck. "Bye Lily, bye Norbert!"

"Make sure you hold onto that luck, honey." Lizzie nodded and started to skip back towards the fountain.

"Look after him!" She sang over her shoulder as she disappeared into the twisting throng.

It was dark in the bowling alley. Burnt out strip lighting hung from the ceiling, like it had been torn out months ago, so the only light was coming from the fires that people had lit at the end of the lanes, the smoke from them creating a fog that had spread throughout the expansive room, making our eyes sting as we made our way between the rubbish and the people in sleeping bags that crowded the lanes. Newt was sitting next to the fire of the furthest lane, only a couple of others near him. His back was to us, but I could tell by the dark blond hair that caught the light and the slope of his shoulders, it was him. Not that we were sure what that meant anymore. Karly was holding my hand so tightly that I could feel her nails digging into my palm.

My stomach was churning, something like panic lancing through my veins. Minho seemed to think Newt would come with us, just like that. Hope, like I said. Maybe seeing Lizzie, seeing these people had extinguished mine, but I knew he wouldn't. He was frightened of himself, and would never want us to be. Whatever state N was in, we'd have to use every line we'd got.

"I told you bloody shanks to get lost!" Everyone froze. Newt's voice was like nothing I'd ever heard, not even in the argument we'd both remembered from years before, our shouts echoing off library walls - not this, a harsh bark saturated with fury. That's it, not him, I thought. He would never say that. The people that matter will always know the difference - I'd promised him. Minho recovered first.

"We need to talk to you."

"Don't come any closer," Newt didn't move. "Those thugs brought me here for a reason. They thought I was a bloody Immune holed up in that shuck Berg. Imagine their surprise when they could tell I had the Flare eating my brain. Said they were doing their civic duty when they dumped me in this rat hole."

His voice was quieter, but no less threatening. I felt guilt rip through me for the thousandth time in the last day. I'd told him a few hours, and the only thing Jorge had warned he'd have no protection against alone had happened. I wanted to speak, but it felt like my throat had closed up.

"Why do you think we're here, Newt?" Thomas tried this time." I'm sorry you had to stay back and got caught. I'm sorry they brought you here. But we can break you out –it doesn't look like anyone gives a klunk who comes or goes."

Newt flinched at the sound of Thomas' voice and turned slowly to face us. He was dishevelled, his hair ruffled and his clothes dirty and torn in at least five places. There was a graze on his jawline that hadn't been there a few nights before. To my relief, his expression was controlled, not the exaggerated emotion of the Cranks around the fountain, but that relief vanished completely when I took in the Launcher in his hands. All of us jumped, taking involuntary steps back.

"Whoa, there," Minho gasped. "Slim it nice and calm. There's no need to point a shuck Launcher at my face while we talk. Where'd you get that thing, anyway?"

Newt's fingers were trembling, just like they had done in the Berg. But this time, I couldn't help him. No amount of WICKED First Aid Kits could solve this.

"I stole it," Newt's eyes lost focus for a second. "Took it from a guard who made me . . . unhappy."

That wasn't him. That soft sentence made me look at Newt - just for a second - in the way that these strangers would. A 6'5 nineteen-year-old, eyes blazing, trained to fight, with muscles you knew about just standing opposite him. It was his mind, his heart, that made Newt one of the good guys. If that disappeared...no. It can't. Newt took a shuddering breath, searching desperately for the words that were eluding all of us.

"I'm . . . not well," He said eventually, his voice strained. "Honestly, I appreciate you buggin' shanks coming for me. I mean it. But this is where it bloody ends. This is when you turn around and walk back out that door and head for your Berg and fly away. Do you understand me?"

Understanding was different to agreeing. I knew why he was saying it, and his fear made my chest ache, but how could we ever leave him here? Newt, who'd never missed a chance to be there for other people, solve their problems rather than his own, how could we leave him to be torn apart by lunatics?

"No, Newt, I don't understand," Minho told him, taking a step closer, making Newt flinch backwards. "We risked our necks to come to this place and you're our friend and we're taking you home. You wanna whine and cry while you go crazy, that's fine. But you're gonna do it with us, not with these shuck Cranks."

Newt moved like he'd been shot, on his feet in a second, any attempt at control vanishing as his measured explanation became a shout. He pointed the Launcher straight at Minho. The shaking had spread from his fingers up his arms again, jolting the weapon, and I didn't know how he was still on his feet.

"I am a Crank, Minho! I am a Crank! Why can't you get that through your bloody head? If you had the Flare and knew what you were about to go through, would you want your friends to stand around and watch you go crazy? Huh? Would you want that?"

The sudden silence was thicker than the smoke from the fires, everyone scrabbling for something - anything - to contradict him with.

Minho ran a hand through his hair, his expression pleading. "You're... you're nowhere close to that. Give us a chance, Newt, we'll sort something out."

Newt gave a derisive laugh, devoid of any humour and spun to me, his voice almost accusing. "Didn't you tell them?"

He gestured to the slowly healing wound above his left eye. The bandage had fallen off, but it seemed to have done the job - the wound was a third of the size and pink rather than the angry crimson it had been.

"Yes, but-" It was the first thing I'd said and came scratchy out of my dry throat. I'd told them about his accident as soon as Janson had warned us about Newt's spiral. I'd hoped he was lying.

Newt's expression and his voice softened as he looked at me. The shaking didn't stop. "Well then. You know, Lil. You saw what I did. I didn't mean it, Min, and it could easily happen again. I couldn't stop it."

Newt's eyes were earnest, but Minho ignored him. "Who gives a klunk, brother? Fine, you do it again, we'll patch you up again. I'll do whatever you need."

Newt growled with frustration, spinning in a circle, one hand pressed to his head and he shouted: "You don't get it, Minho! I don't care! I don't care about myself! If this was just about me, I'd have followed the shucking minions you sent half an hour ago. What if next time, it isn't me we're patching up? At some bloody point, it's going to be one of you!"

There was real anguish in Newt's eyes and I could feel the copycat tears filling my own. He lowered his voice, but every word sounded like it was breaking in his throat before coming out.

"Do you honestly think I could live with that? With the buggin' fear of that, even? What I need, is for you to bugger off! Go somewhere safe!"

It was Thomas's turn then as Newt spun another fifteen degrees. "And you, Tommy. You've got a lot of nerve coming here and asking me to leave with you. A lot of bloody nerve. The sight of you makes me sick."

All of the colour drained out of Thomas' face and he stepped back into Brenda. What? I looked between the two of them, going back through the few days we'd spent together, trying to remember an argument between them, anything that would justify what Newt had just said. There was nothing.

For a long time, Thomas didn't say anything and when he did, his voice was low.

"What are you talking about?"

Newt was staring at Thomas with an expression of absolute stone, of utter impassivity, like he wished the younger boy would combust if he stared long enough. He'd shifted the Launcher aim from Minho to Thomas, but his arms were shaking so badly that I didn't fancy any of our chances if it went off. Then Newt suddenly sighed, the anger washing away from his face as he pointed the Launcher at the ground, like a switch had been flipped somewhere. But he still didn't speak.

Thomas retook his step closer to Newt, one of his arms shifting at his side, like he wanted to reach out to him. "Newt, I don't get it." He whispered. "Why are you saying all this?"

Newt, for the first time in what felt like hours, moved closer. When he finally looked up at Thomas, at all of us, his brown eyes were wide and pleading - so dark now, it was hard to believe they'd ever been copper - and when he spoke, his tone was earnest, the acidity gone.

"I'm sorry, guys. I'm sorry. But I need you to listen to me. I'm getting worse by the hour and I don't have many sane ones left. Please leave. As sincerely as I've ever asked for anything in my life, I'm begging you to do this for me. There's a group planning to break out and head for Denver later today. I'm going with them. This is gonna be hard enough for me now, and it'll make it worse if I know you have to witness it. Or worst of all, if I hurt you. So let's say our bloody goodbyes and then you can promise to remember me from the good old days."

Oh, N. I knew you'd do this. I was wracking my brains as we stood there, flipping through eventualities - there had to be something we could do that wasn't this. There had to be. But my imagination, my reality of the lunatics rolling around our feet was steadily drowning out the hope.

"I can't do that." Minho said flatly. It was what every one of us was thinking, but probably the worst thing for Newt to hear.

"Shuck it!" Newt almost screamed. "Do you have any clue how hard it is to be calm right now? I'm not the bloody nice guy of the Glade anymore! I'm not the person you know, Minho! And I can't be, now, so there's no shucking point, okay? I said my piece and I'm done. Now get out of here! Do you understand me? Get out of here!"

I was so focused on Newt - wanting to run to him as the shuddering overtook his whole body, the Launcher jolting in his hands, but not sure what he'd do if I did - that I didn't notice the older Crank until he raised his gravelly voice, pushing Thomas backwards.

"That boy's a Crank now, and so are we. Now leave him . . . alone."

The man was huge - even taller than Newt and built like a bus. His hair was longer too, matted and dirty. It might once have been ginger. My hand drifted to the knife hidden in my jeans and I saw Karly do the same. We probably should have been frightened, but five years of hell with WICKED, and the total horror of what was happening to Newt had dampened our receptors to fear. Minho growled at him:

"Hey, psycho - this is between us and Newt. You leave."

A slow grin stretched its way across the man's face as he pulled a hand from behind his back. In it was a wicked piece of jagged glass that could have come from any of the shattered buildings here. Blood was streaming out of the man's clenched fist around it, dripping onto his shirt. He didn't seem to care.

"I was hoping you would resist," He spat. "I've been bored."

The man, with incredible speed, swung the glass through the air at Thomas' face - a move that would have taken his eyes out if he hadn't hit the floor in milliseconds. The man raised his arm to swing down at him, but Brenda slammed her fist into his arm, so it jolted and sent the glass shard spinning across the crowded floor. A couple of Cranks around us were regarding us with interest now, and the last thing we needed was anybody else joining in. I jumped over the people in sleeping bags and sprinted into the next lane, snatching up the piece of glass and wincing as it sliced into my palm. Meanwhile, the Minho had tackled the man to the ground with a crash, landing on top of a woman in a sleeping bag who was screeching her head off, clawing at the men, all three of them rolling around the floor like alley cats. I ran back to where Karly was bouncing on the balls of her feet, her knife spinning between her fingers, but there was nothing we could do that wouldn't risk hurting Minho.

"Stop it!" Newt's voice echoed off the thin walls and the high ceiling. "Stop it now!"

The wild fury was back as Newt aimed the Launcher straight at the brawl. His jaw was clenched tight, like it was taking every ounce of control he had not to start screaming. "Stop or I'll start shooting and not give a buggin' piece of klunk who gets hit."

The big man rolled, forcing his way out under the flailing limbs and got to his feet, followed by Minho a couple of seconds later. But, before anyone could work out whether the fight was over, the air suddenly crackled with an electric charge that made every hair on your body stand on end - reminding me for a fleeting second of electric storms of the Scorch - and the man with the greasy hair collapsed to the ground, blue Launcher tendrils wrapping around his body as he foamed at the mouth, screaming in pain, the sound triggering tens of other screams in the crowded room.

I spun back to Newt. He was frozen, holding the smoking Launcher in the same position he'd fired it from, confusion ebbing through his expression, like he'd stepped out of his body for a second and forgotten some controls when he came back.

"I told him to stop," Newt whispered, the same distant confusion running through his voice. He hefted the weapon up in his arms again and, very deliberately, aimed it at Minho - the loudest obstacle. Newt wasn't the only one shaking now. His voice was low but absolutely certain.

"Now you guys leave. No more discussion. I'm sorry."

"You're going to shoot me? Old pal?" Minho was trembling too, but he raised his arms like a man in surrender.

"Go," Newt begged. "I asked nicely. Now I'm telling. Get out of here!"

I couldn't move. Couldn't even speak. It was like something had fixed every bone in my body to the ground. Thomas' voice drifted through the smoke from somewhere behind me.

"Let's go," He said, his voice quiet but exhausted defeat in every syllable. "Come on."

"How did the world get so shucked?" Minho murmured, his voice saturated with disbelief and the raw pain that I could feel burning its way through my own body at the realisation that there was no way out of this. Newt really would shoot us before we could convince him to leave.

"I'm sorry," Newt was taking deep breaths that seemed to catch in his throat, as if he needed to convince himself of every word. "I'm . . . I'm going to shoot if you don't go. Now."

How had we sat in the bedroom of the Berg just two days ago, laughing about crutches and demons and Shakespeare? Newt was openly crying, tears pouring down his cheeks, shaking him even more. Thomas was turning towards the door, Brenda and Jorge with him. The feeling building in me wasn't even nausea anymore, but like somebody had filled my chest with burning coals, heavy and scorching through layer after layer of tissue. I couldn't leave him like this - with weapons and insults and death threats.

"N,-" I started forward and he jolted towards me, as if that syllable was an electric shock.

"Don't." Just like before, the anger had vanished in a heartbeat. His eyes were pleading again and Newt stretched a shaking hand out towards me. "Please. I'm not N, I'm-I'm not him anymore, Lil. I'm-"

"Stop it! Just stop! Stop...we'll go, alright?" My own voice became a shout. It felt like a betrayal to say it. Like something else had been ripped from inside me along with the words. The emotion that had been building reached maximum pressure as the tears in my eyes started to burn. Newt - and everyone else - was staring at me like I'd suddenly split in two, but I could only see the trembling boy with the scratched face and the Launcher in his hands.

"Alright." I repeated, quieter. I didn't know who I was trying to calm. "Alright. Just stop that. Stop talking like you're a monster 'cause of all the shit the world has given you. You're not, okay? You're not."

Newt didn't answer, just carried on watching me with a troubled expression. He didn't lower the gun, but I walked towards him anyway, stepping over piles of ash and abandoned sleeping bags. When I was just a few feet away, Newt seemed to recover enough to protest.

"Lily, no. I'm dange- I'll shoot. Stay - stay back or I'll shoot, I swear it."

He swung the Launcher higher in his grasp and pointed it at me, but somehow, against every natural instinct in my body, I couldn't find it in me to be frightened. I kept walking.

"No, you wouldn't." I said softly. I was close enough now, and I slowly reached out and put my hand over the end of the Launcher barrel - if he shot now, I didn't know what would happen at such close range.

"Lily..." Brenda called, uncertain. But she barely knew him.

Gently, I pushed the barrel of the gun down until it pointed at the floor and pulled it out of Newt's unresisting grasp. Karly stepped forward and I passed the Launcher to her, barely registering the movement. Newt didn't argue, didn't speak - tears were still slipping from his eyes, making his breaths come in shuddering gasps. All he did was hold out his wrists to me, proof of his monstrosity.

Curling around his wrists were the black scars that had made me so sick with Lizzie. They were smaller, only just probing their way up his forearms, but there was no question about what they were, his fair skin contrasting painfully with the poisoned blood vessels. Just like he had that day at WICKED, Newt brushed his hair back from his neck, turning his face to the side to show me. The same permanent web had started weaving up from his shoulder blades across his neck. Two days. But that didn't change anything for me, however damning he thought they were.

I took another step closer to Newt and his eyes flicked to the exit, like he was worried I'd go back on my promise to run. When his gaze returned to me, he said:

"Don't try to-

"I'm not."

Instead, I hugged him. I pushed up onto my toes and wrapped my arms around Newt's neck, pulling him as close as possible - not cajoling or begging, just holding him with everything I had. At first, he didn't move, his hands at his sides, a statue in my arms. But then he did. Newt's arms went around my back, holding and holding and holding, his fingertips digging into my ribs. He rested his cheek against the top of my head, rocking back and forth and pulling me with him.

"You don't scare me, Newt." I said into his shoulder.

"Ohh, you scare me, love." His sigh ruffled my hair and he held me tighter. "You bloody scare me." Somehow, there was smile in his voice, despite the tears I could feel on his neck, the shuddering I was trying to absorb.

"I love you." I murmured, knowing it was late but knowing that I'd never meant anything that much in my life. Newt took a sharp breath in. "And don't you dare try to contradict me."

Newt laughed somewhere in the middle of the sudden sob that racked his body as we held each other, closer, closer, like somehow we could freeze this second in time and memorise every curve of the other person before they melted away into the chaos of the world outside. The last time I'd held him like this had been in the Scorch, strangers, buffeted by the rising sandstorm and the whispers of the other Gladers. Now the whispers were still everywhere, but the only storms were in our minds, rising and drowning out everything around us and I'd never felt less of a stranger. Were you sick by then?

"I love you." I said again, not letting go. Not letting go because letting go would mean letting go of so much more than this moment. I regretted every time I hadn't said those words to Newt before. Regretted that I hadn't told him I loved him when he was dancing around the kitchen, making tea, when he was teasing me about my accent, when he was playing guitar, cross-legged in the Common Room, that I loved him when he was telling a story and waving his arms around like he always did, that I loved him when he sang in the shower or under his breath when he thought nobody was listening. That I loved him then and before and after. I regretted that this was the place I had told him. "I love you, no matter what happens now."

I don't remember when the tears finally spilled over, but by the time Newt loosened his grip and stepped back, one hand resting on my shoulder, tears had streaked my face as well as his. Newt kept the other hand on the side of my face, running his thumb along my cheekbone as he replied, his eyes locked on mine - amber for brown.

"I've always loved you. I loved you when I barely remembered my own buggin' name, Lily...and I-" His voice was catching in his throat again and he took another deep breath. "I'm sorry it has to be this way. I'm so bloody sorry."

"Me too. God, N, I'd do anything-" But I stopped. Because it didn't matter what I was willing to give when there was nothing any of us could do. Newt nodded - he knew. I tried again. "Newt. Please listen to me."

I let my hand slide down from his neck, resting on his chest. "You're a good person. You're one of the bravest, best people I've ever met, sick or not, with us or not."

"Hear, hear." Karly echoed from a couple of steps behind me and I could have hugged her too.

I glanced at the group of slumped men around the fire that the greasy-haired thug had come from before looking back at Newt. "If you only remember one thing, Newton, you remember that. You're a good person. Don't let anybody or that sticking disease tell you anything else."

An ear-splitting scream ricocheted off the walls from one of the Cranks in the bowling lanes closest to the door, making us all jump and Newt press his hands over his ears and screw his eyes shut, hunching his shoulders as he battled with whatever was trying to answer that call inside his head - but it only lasted for a moment, before he straightened up and remembered what we'd said. The sad smile that appeared on his face pulled characteristically from the left side of his mouth, would barely show up on a side profile taken from the right.

"Thank you." Newt pulled me into him, one more time. "For all of it."

The kiss was gentle, and I could feel his fingers trembling at the back of my neck. For just a second, I was back on a roof at WICKED, fifteen years old, being kissed for the first time in my life by a boy with dark blond hair and russet-coloured eyes. The first time and the last.

"I can't leave you here." I whispered. And I meant it - not just literally. I'd promised him literally. But one thing I've learnt over the years is that very little about people and what they mean is literal, physical. It's everything else; the impact they've made, the memories, the holes they leave.

'You won't." And like always, he understood me when he answered, "Not really. No matter what bloody happens to me, I'll always be around to bug ya' - forever, okay?"

Despite the pain, despite the scratching at the back of his mind and the chaos around him, Newt smiled - the one I'd remembered for so many years - as he gripped my hands in his. Keeping his eyes on me, he held one hand out to Karly, who silently passed him the Launcher.

"You go and give them hell for me. Now be off with ya', Tiger-Lily. I'm the one with the gun."

This was it. And I'd promised.

I felt a smile, tenuous but real, on my own face as Karly's hand slipped into mine, pulling me backwards. "The good old days?"

"The good old days." Newt whispered. "See ya' around, Lilybird."

"I'll see you around, Backstreet Boy."

And before I could think - about the look in his eyes, about the tears that were still steaming down his face, about the people surrounding him, about everything leaving would mean - I turned and ran. I'd promised him. I ran, pulling Karly behind me, past Minho and Jorge, past Thomas and Brenda who had made it to the seventh lane, past sleeping bag after sleeping bag, groups clustered around ebbing fires. I ran until I reached the hole where the doors to the bowling alley used to be, leading back to the square with the spluttering fountain. I stopped there and I looked back.

Newt hadn't moved. I could just about make him out, standing at the foot of lane twenty, the Launcher pointed at the boards of the alley.

"I love you!" I called, one final futile attempt to atone for this abandonment. And whether he heard me or not, as I stood there, Newt raised his hand in farewell - a silhouette in the smoke, lit by the fires behind him. By the time we left Denver, I wished that had been the last time I saw him.

We only just made it to the Berg. While we'd been talking to Newt, some kind of insurrection had taken place outside and overwhelmed the guards who'd been waiting for us, and we'd sprinted back through the mock village with more than twenty Cranks on our heels, spitting and shouting and hurling whatever they could get their hands on.

We threw ourselves onto the lip of the Berg ramp as the doors started to close, the pack of Cranks screaming behind us. The doors shut with an almighty crash that echoed through the Berg, seeming so much louder than every other time they'd closed. Minho collapsed against them, burying his head in his hands, his shoulders shaking. Karly scrambled across to him, rubbing the back of his neck and - to my surprise - he let her. Jorge was in the Captain's seat, already ramping up the altitude getting us away from that hellhole as fast as possible. Brenda and Thomas were standing at one of the windows, whispering about the horde of broken people shrinking with every passing second.

And me? I sank into a seat at the kitchenette table, studying the flowered print of the tablecloth with a single fluffy bee bumbling its way through plastic roses. Watch out - they have thorns, I thought. A flash of yellow caught my eye. The jar holding the moss rose had fallen off in one of Jorge's violent twists to get us airborne and smashed on the kitchen tiles. I got up, pulled a Hoover out from the cupboard and saw the spider-catcher. "At least it's not bloody radioactive." I picked up the big pieces with my fingertips and hoovered up the glass shards, going over the tiles three times to make sure. I found another jar in the cupboard above the sink and put the wilting moss rose into it. A laugh. "Allow me to present this gift to ya' as a token of my undying devotion, m'lady."

I turned on the tap, filling the makeshift vase with water around the flower, and it was then that I began to realise what had never crossed my mind - a lightbulb that shone that brightly was always going to burn out.

Three Days Later - The Right Arm Base.

"That's it?" Minho was leaning back, cross-legged, against the wall of the crowded windowless room with his arms folded, his voice incredulous. "That's their big plan? Sacrifice you to the gods of WICKED and hope we get there before they cut your brain into tiny pieces?"

Thomas - who had been talking - sighed heavily and spread his hands wide, like he was trying to decide where to start. He looked tired, I decided. He hadn't told us about what he'd had to go through to get the information he was giving us, but - judging by the tears in his clothes and the exhaustion written in every line of his face - it looked like hell.

When we flew away from Denver's Crank Palace, we didn't have a plan, but being kidnapped by the Right Arm - a protest initiative raising money for protecting the Immune and the healthy from the Flare, seemingly co-run by Gally, the outcast from the boys' Glade - as soon as we landed in the city definitely wasn't it.

We'd forced the guards who'd trapped us in here with fifty other Immunes kidnapped from various places to take Thomas and Brenda to meet Gally and Vance - the leader of the Right Arm - and tell us what was going on. From what Thomas had told us, they'd quickly realised that a bunch of WICKED escapees with prices on their heads and extensive knowledge of the layout of the WICKED compound could become their most valuable assets and told us everything there was time to explain.

Thomas had explained that the Right Arm had a master engineer on their side - Charlotte - who had created a device that would disable all of WICKED's weapons, but it was close range and took an hour or so to hack, which would need both a distraction and someone on the inside - this was where we came in.

"Yeah." Thomas tried to counter Minho's scathing summation. "That's 'the big plan'. It's got to be. We haven't got much time left - and I'm the only one WICKED still want. Look around at who's in here."

To our surprise, when we'd been unceremoniously dumped in this half-lit set of rooms by the Right Arm guards, we'd found that some of our friends from the Trials had been dumped here too - Charlie (who I was so relieved to see that I nearly cried), Aris and Teresa, as well as Sara, Clint and Gwen.

"If they're not even looking for Teresa and Aris anymore, then what they want me for must be pretty final." Thomas continued. "And pretty crucial, meaning that I'm the only foolproof way in. WICKED are buying more Immunes faster than the Right Arm can warn them - they don't need any of you. It's got to be me."

"And there's no other way?" Karly was slumped on the other side of Minho, a frown creasing her forehead. "'Cause Min's right, Thomas, that sounds a hell of a lot like a sacrifice to me."

I nodded as Thomas scrabbled for the words again. Hasn't there been enough sacrifice? But the younger boy shook his head.

"Not in this timeframe. We've got to do something tomorrow. We've got to stop them."

"What happens if we don't?" I asked, doing as he said and looking at the people around us. Every single Immune looked exhausted and battered, emotionally and physically. Some people's clothes were torn, their faces scratched and bruised. Much as I wanted to hope, I was struggling to see what chance we could stand against Janson, Paige and their billion-dollar organisation.

Thomas' expression got even darker and he rubbed his forehead with his fingertips before answering. "That's why we're all here. The Right Arm are pretending to sell all of you as Immunes back to WICKED, to get you - and their people - into the compound. WICKED want more Immunes because they failed with us. They're going to run the Trials again."

My heart dropped. Run them again? When the murder of over a hundred teenagers over four years had not brought them anywhere close to a cure or even a treatment? How could this happen again? It made me sick that we lived in a world where that could even happen once. From the people in this room and the newspaper reports about the Immunes going missing, it looked like WICKED were using people as young as four and as old as eighty. And, if they were running any Trials again, with the state the world was in - Quarantined cities falling every month - they didn't have the years they'd spent on us to lose. Whatever they did to these people would have to be short, and that could only mean worse. Opposite us in the darkened hall sat a young woman, her hair wound into beautiful braids around the crown of her head with a little boy with brown hair and dark eyes in her lap, who was running a tiny red train up and down his mother's arms, narrating the journey and the stops it was making to pick up his imaginary villagers. The idea of anyone taking a child as small as that and putting them in front of a Griever made me want to break something and scream.

The faces of the others had become just as set as my own. Nobody was going to question Thomas after that.

"Guess that's all of us in then." Minho muttered. "I'll blow the shucking place into the Atlantic before they try that klunk."

"Well said, hermano." Jorge nodded at Thomas for the first time since he'd got back. "We'll blow 'em apart."

A quiet voice said. "Thomas?"

It was Charlie. She'd moved back over to lean against me, her head on my shoulder and had listened to Thomas' speech with tight lips and a focused expression.

"Yeah?" He gave her his best smile.

"I've still got these..." Charlie dug around in her rucksack and pulled out the wooden box with its rows of razor-sharp darts.

"Great!" Thomas' enthusiasm was forced, but I was grateful for it all the same, because it reflected back in a smile on Charlie's face. "They'll go running, Charlie."

Thomas sank down to the floor then, his speech done, just as some of the Right Arm guards came around with bowls of rice and some kind of stew that they handed out to us.

"Do you think the world has any real food left?" Minho mused, picking at a strangely shaped vegetable in his stew. "Or are we doomed to a lifetime of tasteless vegetables and rice whether we go crazy or not?"

"Cadbury's hasn't shut down yet." Brenda smiled from the other side of the circle. "So, we've still got chocolate, if we ever get out of here."

"Thank God." Karly replied. "That'd be enough to drive me crazy."

"Hey, Lily?" Charlie suddenly remembered something and sat up, twisting to face me

"You'll never guess what AD Janson brought into the Common Room at WICKED after the Swipe thingy - it was the best thing ever."

Clint laughed and nodded at her. "Ach, yeah. That was pretty cool - even for an evil bastard like Janson."

"Hmm..." I tried to make an interesting guess. "The best thing ever...really fluffy sweaters."

Charlie shook her head. "Sweaters are good. But it's June. So, no. What else?"

"A lifetime supply of candyfloss?" I offered. Charlie wrinkled her nose at that one.

"No! That'd be all sticky and disgusting. Guess again."

"A unicorn." Minho joined in, eyebrows raised.

"No, no. Oh, can I just tell you?" Charlie was practically bouncing up and down next to me.

I smiled. "You're right, I'll never guess it. Go on, honey."

"A puppy!" Her eyes were shining at the memory, like it was the most magical thing that had ever happened to her. "An actual puppy! I haven't seen a puppy since I was really really really small! And it was a brown one, with shaggy ears, and she was so bouncy and soft and we were allowed to hold her and take turns to play ball. Her name was Lucy and she was so so cute."

Everyone 'ahh'-ed accordingly - both at the description of the puppy and at the little girl practically fizzing with excitement over it, having to give some reluctant brownie points to AD Janson, immaculate weasel or not. Everyone except for Thomas. It didn't look like he'd heard a word of Charlie's story - he was staring at the space between Minho and Jorge opposite him with tired eyes and a closed expression. Wherever his mind was, it wasn't this room. I almost got up then and went over to him. He had a cut on his jaw that hadn't been there the day before and a dark bruise blooming above his right eyebrow. I made a mental note to check those out as soon as we'd finished dinner. Charlie was still talking next to me:

"I think he might have got in trouble with Chancellor Paige for it, though. We heard her saying-"

A dull boom echoed from somewhere outside our safe room, sending things rattling and momentarily cutting off all conversation inside. We'd been here just over twenty-four hours, and that seemed to happen every once in a while, a harsh reminder of the destruction that had befallen the city of Denver in just a few days. Sometimes the bangs were followed by or started with screams or - even more disconcertingly - gunshots. Minho's hollow whisper about Newt after we left the Crank Palace slipped into my mind unbidden, however much I tried to force it back. "What happens when he runs out of Laucher grenades?" I didn't want to think about it. Min's thoughts seemed to have drifted in the same direction.

"Do you think Newt really went to the city the other day?" He asked nobody in particular. The unspoken part of his question still hovered in the air: do you think he's out there? Thomas seemed to jolt at Minho's words, wrapping his arms around the knees he'd already pulled up to his chest. I guess none of us wanted to think about it.

"Probably." I answered. "He said he would - and I guess anything's better than the Palace, right?"

"Mmm... wonder what he's doing." Minho said. That was more than I was letting myself do. "He'd know what to do tomorrow. He was always the one with the plans that shucking worked...hope he's staying out of the way of these shuck crazies..."

Minho gestured to the door that the sound had echoed behind. "It's a good thing this place doesn't have any freakin windows. I don't need to see 'em as well has hear 'em. Can't sleep already."

I was about to make a sound of general agreement and turn my attention back to the rice shards coagulating at the edges of my bowl when I cast another fleeting glance at Thomas, who still hadn't moved, and suddenly noticed the tears that were slipping out of his eyes and down his face, dripping into the stew that he hadn't even touched.

"Thomas?" I was on my feet and moving to crouch in front of the younger boy. "Hey, hey - what's up, Tommy?"

I used Newt's nickname without thinking. Thomas gasped like he'd been sitting underwater and suddenly remembered how to breathe, and he batted my hands away like I was fussing.

"I - I - it's nothing, Lily. It's been a shucking long day. I'm - I'm fine."

But by then, Minho had noticed too and had scooted across the circle to his friend, already shaking his head.

"Nah, I've seen too many shanks crying the last few days, and so far, it's never been freaking nothing. Come on, man, fess up." Something seemed to occur to Minho then, a flicker of guilt crossed his face and he said. "It's Newt. I shouldn't have mentioned him. Sorry, Thomas, I thought-"

"No!" Thomas was shaking his head too, but, if anything, the tears were coming thicker and faster. "No, no, it's not that. It's not mentioning him. It's not - it's not that."

"What then?" Minho asked, shrugging. "Come on, you shanky girl, there's clearly something up. Spit it out, man, we're friends, aren't we? It can't be-"

"He's dead, Minho!" Thomas shouted, his voice echoing off the high ceiling. "Newt's dead - he's not going anywhere, he's not avoiding anyone, because he's dead, okay?"

Minho fell backwards from his crouching position in front of Thomas, knocked back by one of the hands Thomas had pulled away from his face as he shouted. But, when he landed, Minho just crossed his legs under him, a look of relief spreading across his face. He clapped Thomas' shoulder, while Thomas looked, wide-eyed, between Minho's face and the hand on his shoulder.

"Thomas. Buddy. You're wrecked." Minho was almost laughing. "Newt's not dead. We saw him three days ago - yeah, he was crazy, but the Flare doesn't work that freakin' fast."

Thomas was shaking his head again but Minho carried on, ignoring him. "Other than that, this is Newt we're talking about. Yeah, he's a little sweeter than me, but do you honestly think Newt would let some psycho pound his skull in? He gives as good as he gets, man. No way is he dead. Stop freaking out, Thomas, you'll rupture a blood vessel in your eyeballs."

Minho was smiling like it was Thomas that had to be missing something, but the longer I looked at the sixteen-year-old, trembling as he sat there, tears pouring down his face, the fork he'd been clutching clattering to the ground, the more I was certain that it was us that were in the dark.

"Thomas." My voice was steadier than I thought it would be, considering the bolt of fear that was shooting back and forth inside me. I had a sudden desperate desire to hold the wooden lizard against my collarbone as I got to my feet. "What are you talking about? We all left the Crank Palace together. N was fine."

As fine as he could be.

Thomas staggered to his feet too and turned to me, looking at the ceiling, the floor, the doorway, anything to avoid my eyes. Eventually he managed: "I know. I know he was. But I drove through Denver today and I saw him."

The bolt of fear solidified, filling my chest like stone. Thomas took a juddering breath in and looked up at the ceiling, a fresh wave of grief choking him.

"He - he's dead. And I- I know he is because I shot him."

Minho wasn't laughing anymore.

"I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I saw him, and I called and he - he jumped me. He had a gun and he begged me to, to take it. Said he'd shoot me if I didn't, and he would've done. He would've done. He was out of his mind for most of it, but right at the end it was him - it was really him, Minho. He knew me and he knew what he was doing and he begged me. He'd pinned me down, I didn't have a choice and-"

The younger boy moaned and buried his face in his hands. "Oh god, oh god, oh god. He just said 'please', over and over. 'Please, Tommy, please.' And it was him. Oh god, I'm sorry. I'm so sorry. He's dead. I'm so sorry."

Maybe it was the tears streaming down Thomas' usually controlled face, maybe it was the way he was shaking that reminded us all too much of N, maybe it was the piece of crumpled paper that Thomas was twisting around and around between his fingers. But now nobody thought Thomas was overtired.

Minho jumped up from the floor, his feet banging on the boards of the old room, making a few Immunes nearest to us start, and snatched the piece of paper from Thomas' unresisting fingers. He unfolded it and read the couple of words scrawled on the WICKED-stamped paper - Newt's sprawling handwriting, but I couldn't make out the words.

Minho's expression didn't change, instead, he handed the piece of paper to Karly without a word and walked slowly towards Thomas, until he was less than a foot in from of him, and then punched him in the face with all of his strength. Screams and gasps of horror went up from all corners of the crowded room as both boys crashed to the ground amongst the rucksacks and half-empty food trays. Thomas didn't even try to defend himself, keeping his arms at his sides and his eyes closed as Minho flew at him. Minho hit Thomas over and over, kicking him in the ribs, the stomach.

"You selfish bastard!" He screamed. "How could you do that?!"

And then Jorge and Brenda were there, pulling at Minho's arms, dragging him off Thomas while the younger boy could still stand. Minho fought them for a second, twisting and growling, but then he stilled, his body sagging. The once bustling room around us was completely silent.

"How could you do that?" Every syllable rang with betrayal and when Minho looked up, I realised he was crying too. Minho was crying.

Thomas looked just as horrified, slowly getting to his feet with a grimace of pain.

"He begged me, Minho... if you'd seen him, if you'd heard -

Minho cut him off. "He's crazy, you slinthead! He doesn't shucking know!" He stepped closer to Thomas, shaking off the hands of the others and with a heartbreaking flinch, changed tense. "He didn't know..."

"He knew enough!" Thomas was running his hands through his hair, biting his lip. "He was scared enough to write that note the day he found out he was sick. When he had me on the ground, he knew enough to try and protect people from himself - he was your friend too, don't you see it was what he wanted?"

Minho shot Thomas a blistering glare, practically shaking with wrath. "He's my brother, not my friend. And he's dead, because you were too much of a freaking coward to fight him? Huh?"

I didn't like where this was going. This wasn't what we needed. This was last thing he'd have wanted. Thomas' expression went from pain to guilt to anger in a couple of seconds and he shouted:

"No, you weren't there! You don't get to say that!" Thomas looked like maybe he was considering fighting back now, his hands balling into fists.

"I wasn't there?!" Minho shouted, his face twisted with disbelief and fury. "I wasn't shucking there?! Who was there when Newt had to suddenly be Keeper because George died? Who carried his broken body back through the Glade walls while you and your Psychs made notes? Who was there when he cried, when he couldn't walk for months because he'd tried to shucking kill himself, Thomas?"

Minho stopped, his hands on his hips, like something had just occurred to him. "Oh wait, that was your fault too. It's you that doesn't have any right to talk about him, you shuck murderer."

Thomas looked like someone had just stabbed him in the gut. All of the colour drained of of his face, and he froze, opening his mouth but no words came out. No, no, no. This was what Newt had told me about, curled up on the faded Berg couch with an industrial bandage on his forehead - saying the cruellest things, dredged up from the bowels of your mind, just because you knew it would hurt. But that wasn't fair. Newt hadn't had a choice about saying them, the Flare always managed to say them for him, no matter how hard he fought. A wave of searing heat crashed through me and my vision blurred a little around the edges.

"Stop!" It took me a moment to realise the shout had been mine. "Stop it, both of you stop it!"

I was standing between the two boys, arms out, my jaw set, waiting for them to do as I said.

"Are you two crazy? This is so stupid, so sticking stupid! Thomas-"

I spun to face him and carried on. "You're the one who keeps talking about what Newt wanted - do you honestly think he'd want this? His best friends brawling, turning on each other, because of him? The only thing he wanted was for us not to get hurt. So I think you're both being pretty sticking selfish."

I looked over my other shoulder to Minho, who was watching me with wide eyes. "Newt said things that hurt to all of us because of the Flare and he hated it. He have rather had a blinding migraine every second of the day than say some of those things to you. But he didn't have a choice. And you two are Immune and he's-"

I stumbled over it. Stop. Stop thinking, there's not time for that. Stop. I could feel my voice getting higher and the locked door in my mind was rattling and rattling and rattling, dull thuds echoing behind it.

"He's dead, and you guys are still spitting this bullshit. Cut it out!" I took a deep breath and lowered my voice as much as I could manage. "Just cut it out, okay? Talk if you want, cry if you want, I don't care. But for God's sake - no, for N's sake, actually - stop tearing each other apart."

I reached out a little further and laid my hand on Minho's forearm. He met my eyes. Please. The seconds of silence that followed felt like years but he eventually said.

"Fine." Minho took a couple of steps back, away from Thomas. He bowed his head and rubbed the back of his hand across his eyes, utterly unashamed of his tears, then looked back up at Thomas and muttered one final thing.

"A Launcher wouldn't have killed him, you idiot. A Launcher wouldn't have killed him."

Then he snatched his jacket up and was gone, the door into the next room slamming behind him. On my right, Karly got up from the floor and my eyes met hers. I nodded. I'm okay. She sucked her teeth for a second, her brow furrowed, but then she was gone too, following Minho through the steel doors at the end of the room.

"Stay still." I murmured, digging my nails into Thomas' shoulder. "Or I won't get all of it out."

"Sorry." He shifted, trying to find a better angle. I shuffled round to the other side of his knees and pulled him towards me slightly.

"It's okay. Just stay there."

One of the Right Arm guards had given me a first aid kit, and I was picking bits of gravel out of the cut on Thomas' jaw. His eye was going to go black, but there wasn't much I could do about that - I'd handed him an ice pack that he was still holding against his eye socket. None of his wounds were that bad - the physical ones anyway - but I'd already spent more time on them than it ever would have taken back in the Glade. Karly and Minho still hadn't returned, Charlie had drifted over to Teresa and Clint had struck up a quiet conversation with Aris.

I pulled out an antiseptic wipe from the first aid kit and dabbed it across the gash, making Thomas suck in his breath through clenched teeth. After a while, he said.

"I'm sorry, Lily." He wasn't talking about the cut anymore.

"It's okay." I said, my brain still whirring on autopilot, before catching myself. "No. No it's not. It's about as far away from 'okay' as possible, I guess. It sucks. It really sucks."

Thomas nodded, and his eyes were shining again under the electric strip lighting. I paused for a second and rubbed his shoulder. "It's hell. It's hell and I sure as stick can't just go 'whatever' and hug you. But it's - it's not your fault, Thomas. Not really."

"But I shot him. Maybe I could've fought him off...Minho was right, if I'd just shot him with a Launcher..."

I sighed. I didn't want to talk about this. Didn't even want to think about this. "Thomas...N is - was almost a foot taller than you and a hell of a lot stronger. If he wasn't himself, he could have really hurt you. I saw what he did to himself and that was bad enough."

Thomas' eyes weren't focused, his mind back wherever it was that it happened, and I went to go back to the first aid kit and put a strip plaster on his cut, when he suddenly said.

"I haven't shown you this, have I?" He held out the crumpled piece of paper that Karly had dropped to the floor. I shook my head and took it from him. "He gave me that back at WICKED, after he and Minho had that weird fight over nothing...that's why he was so angry at the Crank Palace - I hadn't even read it then."

Slowly, I unfolded the paper with Newt's handwriting on it, from only a week ago. How had it only been a week? The note only had two phrases written on it in black biro, clearly scrawled in a couple of seconds before we made our escape. But they weren't words that needed much elaborating.

Kill me. If you've ever been my friend, kill me.

A bang echoed somewhere deep inside my head, shaking my whole body. It felt like tiny bolts of electricity were ricocheting through my veins and the darkness that had started to ebb its way into my vision earlier pressed in closer, closer. Thomas' voice echoed from somewhere further away than the two metres it was in reality.

"I think he was really frightened, Lily." I blinked furiously until the blackness receded and his face came into focus again.

'Not unless it gave me time to lock myself up somewhere.'

'I'm fine.'

'If you can't fend off what's coming at ya', then you've lost, before they've even got to you. You've just got the certainty of death while you wait.'

'I'm scared, Lily.'

I sat back down, the bandage useless in my hands, face to face with Thomas, searching for the words. "I know... I... I'm not sure that he ever really told Minho. But that night on the Berg... I know how scared he was."

And you couldn't help him. Stop.

I didn't have time for this. I stood up again, dropping the paper back in Thomas' lap - I couldn't look at it again. Newt's words were playing in my head, a record player I couldn't turn off, no matter how loud I tried to think over it, but the longer I listened, the more a thought gradually became a certainty in my mind. I unwrapped the bandage, pressed it to Thomas' jaw and ran my finger around the edge of it, fixing it in place before telling him finally:

"Thomas, if you hadn't shot him, he'd have taken that gun and shot himself while he still had the strength. I know he would."

'Lily, I'm dange- I'll shoot. Stay back or I'll shoot - I swear it."

Thomas made a quiet noise, like he was trying to argue, but the sound seemed to catch in his throat as he actually thought about what I'd said, thought about Newt, what he was like. Then he nodded, slowly and murmured. "Yeah. I guess he would've. Self-sacrificing shank."

"Always."

We shared a smile then - if you can call it that. Something I've realised writing this is that there aren't anything like enough words for smiles. Grins? Smirks? What else is there? There should be a smile for a smile that isn't anything close to happiness - something that's nothing more than a slight curving of the corners of your lips, barely perceptible - but you smile because it's a connection, a shared understanding rather than a shared happiness. That was what passed between Thomas and me.

Then, I tipped a witch hazel bottle onto cotton wool and dabbed the liquid onto Thomas' bruises quickly before replacing it and zipping up the kit.

"That's all I've got right now, buster." I said quietly. "When those bruises come up for real, I can try something else."

Thomas gently poked the bandage before wincing and pulling back, getting to his feet and offering me another tiny smile.

"Thanks, Lily." Thomas replied. "I mean it. Thank you." He paused. "Er - I'm gonna go talk to..." Thomas rubbed the back of his neck and gestured vaguely in Clint and Aris' direction. I nodded and he wandered off towards them.

I leaned back against the cool stone of the walls and sank to the floor, feeling any energy I had left draining out of my body into the wooden boards below. The room was loud again, conversations overlapping like crashing waves. The little boy with the train had produced a silver car and was spinning it round and round in circles like a scene from a James Bond car chase. One of the chandeliers in the room was flickering, all but one of its bulbs dark - why are there chandeliers in here? A spider was picking its way across the boards a couple of centimetres from my toes, climbing over discarded objects and around people, looking for some darkness to lie in wait from. As I watched it, I realised it only had seven legs. I wondered what had happened - did it drop a stitch in a web and get tangled? One too many water spouts? Newt would know. He'd have a better answer than that. There were seven panels missing in the ceiling. And there were seven black water bottles lined up next to the where the guards had set up camp. Was there some kind of omen in that? Sevens?

Someone slid down the wall to sit next to me. Karly. No sign of Minho. Without saying a word, she shuffled closer, wrapping her arms around me and leaning her head against my shoulder. I bit my lip and rested my head against the top of hers, her hair tickling my face as I did. Everyone kept looking at me. Not for long, not staring, but just repetitive glances, every once in a while - even my friends; Charlie, Clint, Gwen - like they were all waiting for me to burst into tears or start screaming or something. But I couldn't. Not just because I couldn't afford to - there wasn't time for me to dissolve, they needed me together - because I couldn't.

I ran my fingers over the carved lizard and the 'N' I'd scratched into its base a thousand years ago. I thought about Minho screaming at Thomas until his voice was raw, about Thomas' fingers shaking so much he could hardly pull out the note. But I was hollow - empty - like a tree somehow standing with only the bark left around it. Like I was separate from my body, a spectator in this dystopian horror show. And I felt nothing. Nothing at all.

  
  



	31. Truths, Teamwork and Total Oblivion

**Chapter 31 - Truths, Teamwork and Total Oblivion**

**THE NEXT DAY - THE WICKED COMPOUND**

We were back. It seemed bizarre, running through the coral corridors of WICKED past tens and tens of abandoned offices and workrooms, practice halls and bedrooms, that we were here again.

When we got up that morning and were hustled into the Right Arm's people movers for transportation into the WICKED compound, there was a clear plan: get Thomas in, get the army of Immunes in, find the prisoners then hack the weapon system and shut them down. Now, I was fairly certain there was absolutely no plan.

I grabbed Brenda's arm. "Do you know where we're going?" I asked, glancing worriedly back at the two hundred Immunes we had led out of WICKED's prisons, as if we knew how to escape.

Brenda bit her lip. "I think so. There's a room behind all of the labs - Chancellor Paige had it disguised as a storeroom - it's enormous, it was built to withstand nuclear blasts."

"It'll need to be." Gally had caught up, his brow furrowed. "However many explosives you think the Right Arm have put in this place, multiply it by fifty and you might be close." He checked his watch, nervously. "They'll go off any minute, and then the whole compound's going to be unstable. We'll have minutes at best. Are you sure about this, Thomas?"

Thomas looked exhausted - he had surgical pen mixing with angry lacerations all over his face, some from yesterday and others from whatever he'd already endured that morning - but his jaw was set as he replied. "No. But what choice do we have?"

"Walk and talk, muchachos, walk and talk." Jorge was spat out of the crowd behind us and appeared at Brenda's shoulder. "Can't be stopping if the whole place is gonna blow. Two lefts and a right, people."

We started running again, Karly and Minho jogging to the back to make sure nobody got lost. Left left right, left left right again, every identical corridor making my head spin. If somebody had told me we were running in circles, by then I would have believed them.

"This better be the best idea you've ever had, hermano." Jorge muttered to Thomas, as we stumbled down a flight of stairs behind the chemical labs.

"It's not." Thomas gasped, helping a small girl to her feet who had stumbled on the bottom step. "But I don't have another one. I'll explain when we get there."

Just then, a tremendous boom sounded, echoing off the close walls of the corridors, and the sound of glass shattering through the nearby labs filtered in through the roar that was still filling our ears, the sound almost like hearing a thousand cannons underwater. Tens of people fell to the floor, crashing into limbs and furniture that the blast had upended. There were screams from further down the corridor, where part of the ceiling had collapsed onto the Immunes below. I pulled person after person off the carpet that was coated with chunks of plaster, ushering them after Brenda who'd sprinted off down the corridor at an even faster pace than before as ominous creaking sounds pressed in around us.

"Come on, come on!" Gally grabbed my hand and pulled, dragging me after him towards the turn Brenda had taken. "Not much time!"

As we stumbled through the corridors - now littered with every type of debris - I glanced at his face a couple of times. I know you. Gally had abandoned the Right Arm, realising their scheme was doomed to fail and followed Thomas to help the rest of us. I hadn't been there when the others had met him a few days before, and his name meant nothing to me, but - standing alongside him, hearing him speak - I was certain we'd met before, though the tens of reconstructive surgery scars all over his face didn't help me place him.

I couldn't see the others - lost somewhere in the crowds of panicking people - but I stayed with Gally, through corridor after corridor, until we suddenly took a left and the coral walls disappeared, opening out into an enormous hall with a concrete ceiling. Nets, light fittings and computer monitors had crashed to the floor in the blast, creating one more fatal obstacle course. There were markings all over the floor, like a high-school gym, and a tiny door set into the far wall that Brenda was wrestling open, pushing plastic mops and buckets out of the way and hustling the men, women and children inside. We hurried across the expanse of polished floorboards towards the storage cupboard, leaping over broken plastic, twisted ropes and metal, when an almighty cracking sound came from overheard.

"What the?" Minho was there, glancing up at the ceiling and whispering. "Oh, we're shucked now..."

As we watched, the tiny crack in the far corner of the ceiling started to spread, a sinister spiderweb gnawing across the whole sheet of concrete above us, chips already falling from the chasms it created. This room was coming down. Damn, damn, damn.

"Yep, time to go." Minho scooped up a small boy who was crying on the shining floor and started running for the door again, the rest of us hot on his heels, grabbing whoever we could reach and pulling them with us, not looking back, fighting to block out the screams of the people who failed avoid the falling stones - some the size of small cars or training Bergs. I'm sorry, oh god, I'm sorry.

"Wait!" One scream rose above the others, the voice filled with more than wordless fear - somehow, the single syllable contained desperation, determination and command.

We all turned, as a figure staggered out of a hidden door in the wall opposite, moving like he'd been running for hours and breathing just as heavily.

"Please, wait!" It was AD Janson.

The man looked ragged - his hair had fallen out of its usual careful style, he was covered in dirt and brick dust and there was a deep cut just below his hairline, the blood from it slowly trickling down the side of his face onto his collar.

"Haven't enough people died, Janson?!" Thomas shouted. The younger boy had skidded to a halt a couple of metres behind me. "Who do you think you are?!"

The venom in Thomas' voice matched the acidic feeling that was twisting its way through my veins at the sight of AD Janson. What can he possibly want with us now? But there was something more than a little off about Janson this time. His customary white tailored suit had vanished, replaced by dark wash jeans, a beaten-up brown leather jacket and gray sneakers. He was standing taller than usual too, his shoulders back and his head held higher.

Janson looked desperately sad for a second and took a couple of steps closer to us, his hands outstretched, palms forward in surrender and he called: "I've not quite lost myself, yet, Thomas. The problem really lies in who you think I am!"

What the hell was that supposed to mean? Janson didn't wait for us to answer and shouted again, still moving forward. "Let me come in - you must know, the Flat Trans isn't the only way! Ava planned it as final escape route, but it is not the only way. I can explain it all to you - I must explain!"

"You would say that." Minho sneered. "I think we know all we need to know about slintheads like you."

That made Janson laugh, the sound jarring amid the desolation and the chaos - and even now, I'm convinced that seeing somebody laugh while looking like their soul is writhing in misery is one of the most disconcerting things I've ever seen.

"Ah, I wish you did! That would have spared me a lot of pain over the last decade. Didn't I tell you to trust nothing and no-one in this place? Including the man you believed to be me?"

Believed to be? This guy is crazier than we thought. But even as I thought that, I couldn't shake the feeling that there was something odd about the scientist. His voice kept dropping in an out; one second he spoke in the nasal, reedy tones of the weasel of a man that we knew, the next second, in a much deeper, rich tone that made me pause in our escape each time I heard it. One of his hands was at his neck, scrabbling behind his ear as if he was pulling at something, but whatever it was was refusing to come loose. The man virtually growled in frustration as Minho fired back:

"Yeah, you did. So why the hell should we trust you now, Rat Man? How do we know you won't just kill us all the second we get in there?"

Another boom sounded as a huge piece of concrete, the size of a wardrobe, crashed down just a couple of metres to our right, making everyone jump and a couple of stragglers make another break for the storage cupboard, abandoning the stand-off between AD Janson and the Gladers. The crash sent even more fractures spiralling across the hall ceiling, which already resembled an Ancient Greek mosaic. That seemed to make Janson even more frantic - he didn't even answer Minho's questions, just shouted, his voice strained and full of emotion:

"You need to listen to me! Everything I have told you about myself is a lie, and Ava Paige has told you nothing but half truths. I am more sorry that you can ever know, but there will be time for apologies when you are all safe!"

Janson was scrabbling with both hands at what seemed to be some kind of tiny earpiece, now he was closer. It had tiny wires extending from both ends, but still didn't seem to be any closer to detaching from his head.

"Let me help you!" He pleaded.

Some of the Gladers around me actually laughed at that, but for some reason, I couldn't - something about the expression on the man's face, the most emotion I'd ever seen him show.

"J!" Another figure ran out of the hidden door and sprinted to Janson, putting a hand on his shoulder.

"Are you alright?" Timmy asked. Timmy was wearing a faded t-shirt and blue jeans, and concern was written all over his face as he looked at the older man. Janson pushed his hands away and said:

"I'll make it, Timmy, I'm fine - now, help me."

Janson gestured at the device behind his ear. "I need it off."

Timmy frowned and glanced at the ceiling, starting to shake his head. "Doc, this place-"

"Help me!" Janson shouted. "Please! They won't give me time!"

Timmy joined in, pushing at various buttons and minuscule levers on the device, when another grinding noise cracked around the room. The ceiling. The cracks were getting wider and wider every second. Even more hunks of concrete started to land around us, the floorboards splitting now too.

"Run!" Thomas screamed, Janson forgotten or abandoned in the immediate terror. "Run, go - go!"

And we ran, jumping over the raised floorboards, the concrete and metal. Everyone's eyes were fixed on the small door on the far wall, on Brenda who was holding it open. Gally was next to me, Karly on my other side, Minho just behind and Thomas somewhere up in front, shouting at people to move faster. Another thud sounded a couple of metres behind us, but it was more of a thunk than a crash, as if the concrete had made contact with something other than then floorboards - someone. As if to confirm my thought, a long moan carried across the hall to us.

"Janson..." Karly breathed, looking suddenly sick. We both paused, but Minho shouted.

"Who shucking cares?! Keep going!"

I started moving again, trying not to think about the man and the tens of others that had been crushed under tons of stone in the last fifteen minutes and how many others might suffer the same fate. If only we could-

"Linnet!"

The shout wasn't loud amid the grinding of the shifting building, the wails of tortured people, the splintering glass and the calls of panic, but I heard it like it was a scream. I couldn't move. I knew that voice, somewhere deeper than the memories I could reach, somewhere in my core, I knew that voice.

"Nettie, baby!"

The sounds of the WICKED compound faded away around me, drowned by the noises in my head.

I was a tiny girl, curled up on a circular window seat, tucked into somebody's lap, strong arms around me, turning the pages of a picture book. "Look at the Space Captain, Nettie. Do you like her?"

I was six or seven on the floor of a garage, the sun streaming in through the open doors. A disembowelled car was in front of me and I was twisting cogs and wheels into patterns that made all of them turn while a man with tumbling brown curls bent over the open bonnet, his sleeves rolled up to show the criss-cross of scars that extended all the way up his forearms. "Whadd'ya know, baby?" He crouched next to me and plucked a cog from my fingers with a smile. "You found just the right one."

I'm ten years old, wrapped in a blanket on a wooden porch. "But you won't be long?" I ask, looking up into the lined face and the amber eyes, exact mirrors of mine. He pulls me into his arms, blanket and all. I don't understand why his eyes are shining. "No, baby - it's just a business trip. Science malarkey, I'll be back before you know it." He steps back, ruffling my hair. "Remember how much I love you, Birdie."

I'm a little older. A tall woman with long blonde curls is standing in the doorway, on the phone again. My mom. She's crying. "Jeremy? What about Linnet?" Her voice is almost desperate. "Jeremy? Jeremy?"

"What's wrong, Mom?" She sees me and holds up the phone with a forced laugh, "Static, baby. It's nothing, honey."

Linnet. Nettie. Birdie. Me. I could almost feel WICKED's contraption falling apart in my head, electric charges surging through me. That's why all those names were so familiar - they're me. All of them. And Jeremy - Jeremy. The note he gave us: J.

"Daddy?" I whispered.

I felt Karly jolt next to me, but her gasped, 'what?' seemed to come from a long way away. I barely heard it. I was already running back.

The man in the brown leather jacket and the dark wash jeans had a different face and crumbling block of concrete pressing on his chest. Janson had vanished and in his place was a tall man, mid forties, with laughter lines around his eyes and his mouth. His chestnut curls were white in patches with brick dust and his amber eyes were full of pain. Timmy had stopped moving, on his knees next to my father.

"Dad!" I collapsed to the splintering boards at his side. "Daddy!"

The ceiling had stopped moving. Something had stuck somewhere, and nothing fell - I didn't know how long for. Jeremy Serralier turned his head towards me, tears shining in his eyes and a slow smile spreading across his face.

"Hello, baby." He laughed softly but it made him cough, the dust spraying onto me and Timmy. "You remembered...science malarkey, see? I told you it was all rubbish, didn't I? My God, look at you. So beautiful, Birdie. You look like your mother."

He reached up and ran a trembling fingertip down the side of my face and I grabbed his hand. A spiderweb of thin white scars covered his arms. It felt like everything in my body was twisting, every cell pulling apart and making me shake.

"I look like you." I murmured. "But...what... what happened? Where's Janson?"

Dad laughed again, softer this time, as Timmy held up the earpiece, finally detached.

"AD Janson doesn't exist, baby. He was a Variable - a character, a technological disguise WICKED devised. The technology's never been tested, it masks all of your distinguishing features, your voice, even your height."

My head was spinning - so every time AD Janson had appeared in front of us, every time he'd sent us a secret message, hidden clues in tasks, that had been my Dad? For five years?

"WICKED fed almost every damn thing I said to you through that thing." His voice dropped with scorn. "I couldn't remove it or even attempt to disobey until the systems went down. If I did, if I broke their 'character' or damaged a Variable, they'd have killed you or the boy...Newt."

His voice trailed off as he tried to look past me, searching for Newt among the Gladers clustered back to the door.

"They killed him anyway." I whispered and my father's face contorted in pain.

"God...I'm sorry, Nettie. That poor kid. God, I tried to protect him...I tried-" A harsh cough cut off his words and the breaths he was heaving in were shallow.

"Careful, Doc." Timmy's hand was back on Dad's shoulder. "You gotta tell her. I'll fix the rest."

My Dad nodded, his eyes lighting, like he'd snapped out of something. "Yes, yes. Linnet, listen to me."

He scrambled in his jacket pocket, but his fingers couldn't make contact with whatever was in there, his breathing still shallow. Timmy reached over, fished it out and passed it to me - a single USB drive, dark blue with a lightning symbol scratched into it. Project Electricity? In that second, the pieces I'd collected through my dreams and the weeks at WICKED slid into place.

"You're him." I said, looking up at Timmy then back at my father, my expression wondering. "Project Electricity. You're the guy on the inside!"

"The guy on the inside!" Timmy scoffed, though it had been him that said it. "He's the only guy - Electricity is Jem's project. It's his Cure!"

"A Cure?" How was that possible? My voice was disbelieving and my father waved his hands at me quickly, shaking his head and coughing.

"No, no, Linnet. Not a Cure. Not yet - but you have to listen to me." He took my hand again, his grip vice-like and pulled me closer to him. His eyes were focused. "There's...there's only time for me to say this once, baby. Everything you need is on that stick, everything I've worked on for the last decade is on that stick. There are videos on there that explain it all. But we found a drug - Elpis, you've seen it, I made sure of it - it's the first drug we've found that reverses the effects of the Flare. We're not sure how far, it repairs but not fully. The concentration isn't right and it needs combination with something else yet-"

Another coughing fit crashed over him and, this time, there was blood on his lips. That snapped me out of my shock. I don't think I'd even really registered that he was injured at all, forget so badly, until that moment, overwhelmed by the memories. I spun and scrabbled in my rucksack for my first aid kit, but it wasn't there. No. There had to be something in here, there had to be.

"Nettie." His hand was on my arm. "Don't. There's nothing. Listen to me-"

"No, no, we can do something! Thomas!" I pushed on the concrete, trying to lift it, scraping until the blood welled on my fingertips. "Help! Somebody help me! I've got WICKED's bandages, ligatures, we can do something, we can fix this. Dad? Dad!"

His eyes had fluttered closed, but he forced them open and dug his nails into my arm, making me focus again. "No, Birdie. You can fix this - this goddamn disease. Don't be silly now. There's not much time. Don't go through that Flat Trans, it's perfectly safe, but once you go, you can't come back. There are... there are centres being built in the Andes by my contacts out there. Go with Timmy, take my research, take it to the centres. We're so close, baby, so close now. You can do it."

"What?" I could feel the hysteria creeping in, seizing in my chest. I couldn't lose anyone else. "No, no, I'm not a scientist. I need you, I can't-"

"No. No, you don't." He smiled and it was a sad smile. Proud. "You haven't needed me for a long time. I'd give anything to come with you, Nettie. I'm sorry."

My father turned his gaze to Timmy, who was still bending over him. "Guide her for me, T. Look after them."

Timmy's voice was shaky as he replied. "You got it, Doc."

No, no. But there was nothing I could do - as I sat there, more blood was pooling on his lips and his breaths were getting shallower and shallower. No, I can't do this again. Was I destined to watch everybody I loved fade to nothing in front of me? My chest was so tight, I wasn't sure I was even breathing myself.

"Daddy! Daddy..." I sat forward now, brushing his hair out of his face, twining the fingers of his other hand with mine too. "Please..."

But he shook his head, slowly but firmly, his eyes wide, air rattling in his throat.

"No...no. You can do it...my girl. It's-" A weak smile flickered across his lips. "-an inevitable." Another racking cough, a cough that should have torn the last shreds of life from him then, but he clung on, his fingers tight in mine. "I... I love you more than my life. Give them hell for me, Birdie."

And then he let go.

The room was still. The only sounds that filtered in came from far away, from other areas of the WICKED compound. The dust was settling in the abandoned hall, the ceiling no longer shifting. I heard Gally say: "That was only half the explosion. The rest will blow any second and then the walls are coming down."

Move? My father's eyes were closed, his body still, his hand limp in mine. I was an orphan and he was dead, another brilliant casualty of WICKED's rampant destruction.

"Linnet - Lily." Timmy took my hands. "Come on, now. We've got to move."

"But, but he-"

Timmy's fingers were shaking in mine. "He's not here now, honey. But you are. He wanted you safe. We've got to move. Come on now."

And he dragged me to my feet, both of us staggering through the door at the far end of the hall and collapsing to the floor inside, leaving the shell of my father, broken on the floor of the ghostly gym.

As soon as Timmy and I made it through the doorway, Brenda pulled the door closed with a bang and started frantically entering some kind of code into a keypad on its inside. When she finished, it emitted a strange hissing whoosh and the door seemed to expand, blocking all light and air from the room outside.

"What was that?" A tall, thin man wearing ragged clothes and clutching two small children to him barked at Brenda. "What're you people doing with us now?"

Annoyance flashed across Thomas' face, but Brenda's was kind as she looked at the trembling kids. "Safety measures. It activates all the safety equipment in this room - the whole place could blow now and we wouldn't even know. We're well underground. If you all could just sit down, we'll explain what's going on as quickly as possible."

The man nodded shortly and sat down, gathering his children into his lap. Looking around the room, there were at least two hundred people crammed into the room, of all ages, all genders and all stages of disarray. Despite that, it wasn't loud; the only conversations were rippling in low murmurs around the room. Everyone was assembled in front of a shiny patch of air that was flickering in and out - the Flat Trans. Thomas was positioned in front of it, his brow furrowed, like he was about to deliver a lecture in a university college. Minho was staring at me and raised his eyebrows and tilting his head towards the door we'd just staggered through, as if to say "what the shucking hell was that?" But I couldn't explain now. 'Later', I mouthed and he nodded. Karly was at his side and she patted the empty space of carpet next to her, with a fragile smile.

Grateful for the distraction, I picked my way across the crowded floor and squashed into the space Karly had left. Timmy let me go, but stayed behind us, patting my shoulder to let me know he was there. Karly slipped her hand into mine and squeezed. I hadn't noticed until then that my hands were shaking. It was that out-of-body feeling again, like whatever had happened that morning had happened to somebody else.

To my surprise, just behind Thomas, leaning against the wall by the Flat Trans was Gally - his hatred of Thomas with the fire of a thousand suns seemed to have dimmed somewhat amid the chaos of the crumbling compound. We were practically sitting at Thomas' feet, so we all caught Gally's whisper.

"Are you sure this is the right way, Thomas?"

"Quit asking me that." Thomas murmured, irritation coating his voice as he tried to keep his face impassive for the onlookers. "It's the only way."

"That's not what-" Gally's gaze flicked to me and he swallowed the words.

"Whatever." Thomas pushed off from the wall and took a step closer to the crowd of Immunes in front of him - and it was only then that I realised there were tear stains mixing with the pen and gashes on his face. What happened? I twisted around in my seat, trying to count the people I knew in the crush of bodies in the room. Clint, Charlie, Brenda, Jorge, Harriet, Sonya, Frypan, Billy, Elle, Sara, Gwen, Aris. There was somebody missing. I craned my neck to try to see over the heads in front of me - where was Teresa? I couldn't see her. It wasn't until much later that day that I discovered her fate had been identical to Dad's, but her absence was enough to make my heart sink and my eyes prickle for the thousandth time in eight hours. Oh, Tommy.

The tension in the room was almost palpable, and this was even more obvious when Thomas cleared his throat and a deathly silence fell, four hundred eyes fixed on the sixteen year old.

"Er, hi, everyone." He started. "Some of you might know me - my name's Thomas Edison. I used to be involved in the running of WICKED-"

That statement triggered a rumble of dissent through the crowd and Thomas was quick to thrust his arms out and exclaim: "I'm not anymore! They used me as part of their Maze Trials, just like they used a lot of my friends." He paused. "I've even watched far too many of my friends die. This pen on my face is from the prep for an operation that WICKED were about to perform when my rescuers showed up - they were about to knock me out and cut up my brain for research."

Gasps sounded from all corners of the room as the harrowed expressions got even darker.

"So it's pretty fair to say that my values don't quite align with theirs anymore. The Trials can't run again. Ever. But there's a lot of people that disagree out there, and I'm not arrogant enough to be sure they've all died in that blast, which why we need to get all of you out of here as soon as possible. But, this morning, I received some information from - from someone who sympathises with us. They informed us of the location of this room, of this Flat Trans."

Thomas stepped back and gestured to the expanse of flickering air. "It leads to an isolated island, well developed with resources to support a human population easily. We can escape through here, escape the Flare, the Cranks and the governments who mean to exploit you, but we have to do it quickly. For those of you that have never used a Flat Trans before, I promise it's totally safe. But there really isn't much time, once Brenda enters the code to open the Flat Trans, we'll have maybe fifteen minutes to get everybody through, maybe less - so it's really important that everyone's ready."

Thomas' expression was earnest as he surveyed the crowd. "Does everybody understand? Is everybody with me?"

There had been a lot of times leading up to that day when people had expected me to be angry with Thomas - when we captured him in the Scorch, when he got the others trapped in a cafe in Denver, when he forgot to read N's note and when he actually carried out the bleak instruction in contained without thinking. But that moment, sitting on a carpet in a WICKED storage cupboard was the first time that I actually was. I knew that this was the only escape Ava Paige had given us, the ones that the all-powerful government officials had given us, but how could he just accept it? After everything we'd all endured in the name of this cause, in the name of loyalty, nothing about this plan made sense. At the very least, not for us.

On the day Dad told us we were Immune, he'd given us a chance - a responsibility even. We could do things, go places, discover things that would be a death sentence for the majority of the population - we could help people. With that single genetic mutation, we had an advantage that almost nobody at WICKED ever possessed. And we weren't going to use it? We were just going to leave through a magic technological portal and leave the rest of the world to burn? The thought made the blood rush to my face.

I thought about the enormous, Glade-like walls of Denver, the way that the disease had somehow surmounted them and festered inside until the city erupted, dooming thousands. I thought about the tens of walled cities, protected areas that would gradually suffer the same fate. I thought about Newt's last words to me, how my Dad had chosen almost exactly the same ones. The USB drive was burning a hole in my pocket.

"You go and give them hell for me."

"Give them hell for me, Birdie."

And I knew I couldn't do it. I couldn't go with them. I twisted around and met Timmy's eyes, behind me. He just nodded, his eyes full of the same horror. Before I could change my mind, before it was too late, I was on my feet and those four hundred eyes were on me instead.

"Lily?" Thomas' confusion was written all over his face. "What're you doing?"

"I'm staying." I said, willing my voice to be firm, controlled. Another wave of gasps and a murmur of unrest washed through the room.

Thomas looked at me I'd slapped him. "What? What do you mean, you're staying? There's nowhere to stay, Lily - there's no other way!"

"Yes." I told him, refusing to break his gaze. "Yes there is."

I fished the navy USB drive out of my pocket and held it up so that everyone could see it. Despite the thuds echoing from outside, the carnage I'd seen, the adrenaline that had to be coursing through my veins, I was completely calm. With my free hand, I pointed towards the door.

"I don't know how many of you just watched my father die. I don't know how many of you were pleased to see the man you knew as AD Janson die, and die horribly. But what you don't know was that man was actually Dr Jeremy Serallier."

The confused murmurs got louder but I carried on. "He was a world-renowned mechanoengineer, and that was why he was targeted by WICKED, forced to participate in their sick production. He didn't choose any of this. But the whole time he was working here, he was effectively a double agent, so deep in WICKED's work that they never guessed what he was doing. For almost a decade, Dad had been siphoning money and resources from WICKED and sending it to a growing project deep in the Andes, supposedly the centre of the Flare virus. It was through that - Project Electricity - that he discovered a drug called Elpis, which is the only chemical discovered so far that can drive back the effects of the Flare."

Whatever control I'd kept over the room dissolved at that point as everyone started talking over each other at the news of this drug - even my friends were staring at me with wide eyes and stunned expressions.

"It's not a cure!" I shouted, hoping my voice could make it over the clamour. "It's not a cure!"

Gally stamped his feet as hard as he could and clapped, with the other Gladers quickly joining in until the room was quiet again.

"It's not a cure." I said again. "But it could be. There are brain scans, multiple tests that show the effect it has on the disease. Dad told me the concentration isn't right yet, and to be really effective, we'd have to combine it with something else and run real test with volunteers. It's a chance. But the centre for research is in a seriously Flare-ridden area - it could pose a threat to non-Immunes, so as it stands, Immunes are the only ones that could possibly complete Dad's research-"

"Why should we believe him?" It was the thin man who had shouted before. "A traitor to first science and then company that employed him. If he'd discovered that much, why didn't he just leave? Enough others did."

"Me!" I cried. "Because of me. WICKED tricked him, and I know he regretted that for the entirety of his employment. But I can see how many of you have children in here. If somebody stole them from you, threatened to murder them, wouldn't you do absolutely everything they asked? Anything to save them?"

The man looked like he was about to say something else, but his small daughter shifted in his arms and he fell silent.

"All of Dad's research is on this drive. It's a chance - he's given us a chance. And I can't throw that away. Not while there's a chance that we could save people. I've lost people too, even trapped by WICKED. Not just those that died trying to find a cure, in the Maze and in the Scorch, but somebody I-"

I wondered how long it would be before these words stopped catching in my throat.

"Somebody I loved, somebody I would have died for, caught the virus and I could only watch as he disappeared, as he turned into something he despised enough to make sure he died before he hurt somebody else. He was dying and I couldn't do a goddamn thing."

I looked around at my friends, at the people who understood. Karly was staring at me, an expression that I couldn't quite read on her face, her lips pressed together. Minho was looking at the floor, one hand on his forehead. Even Gally was slowly nodding.

"I'm not saying any of you shouldn't go. In fact, I think a lot of you should go, because it would mean safety and escape - anyone with children or the elderly or anyone with a family to protect should go. But the family I was born with are dead. One of my closest friends is dead and I'm past looking after myself anymore. My father has given humanity a chance, however slim, and I'm going to take it. If it fails, it fails - if I die, I die, even - but if there is the slightest chance I can stop millions of other people, other families from seeing what we've seen, from feeling like this."

I swept my arm around the room of battered people, some of them with tears shining on their cheeks.

"Then I'm going to take it. I'm going to finish my father's research. You're free to come with me."

That was everything I had. My whole body was trembling and my voice was softer as I turned back to Thomas. "That's what I mean, Tommy."

Thomas just nodded, his expression unreadable, and for a couple of excruciating seconds, the room rang with silence, until a small woman with auburn hair, pointed black glasses and a WICKED lab coat called out.

"Okay. I knew Serralier. He was a clever man, sure. But, no offence intended, you're what, nineteen? And you've spent most of your life trapped in this den - how the hell are you going to even get to the Andes, forget finish the research?"

I opened my mouth to give her an answer she probably wouldn't have liked, but then Timmy was there, one hand on my shoulder.

"Because she has me, Miss Moore." He said. "For those of you that don't know me, I'm Timothy Barnes. Dr Serralier was a good friend of mine. I happen to know that, through his attempts at aid, the Doc had actually contracted the Flare himself, he was testing the drug on himself, which could easily have killed him at any time. I hope that clears any of your doubt about his commitment to the cause. But he knew his time was limited and he planned for the eventuality of the research continuing without him. I myself am a trained neuroscientist and Serralier had a number of invaluable contacts outside this facility that have offered him - or his daughter - help, should they need it. We have access to a significant amount of money siphoned from WICKED, in addition to the support of external benefactors. I trust that answers your question."

The woman could only nod and Timmy squeezed my shoulder again. "Anything to add, Birdie?"

"No." I replied. "You don't have to come with us. I'm not trying to force any of you anywhere. But is anybody in?"

At first, nobody moved. But then, amid muttering, Karly stood wordlessly and crossed the room, linking her arm through mine.

"Always." She smiled and I couldn't help but smile back at her, even with the whirlwind in my head and the dull crashes that we could hear from outside. Then Charlie - tiny, fragile Charlie - appeared on my other side.

"Me too, Lily."

I leant down to her, studying her face. "Are you sure, honey? It's not as safe where we're going."

"Yes!" The little girl wrinkled her nose at me. Then she patted her left pocket, where the outline of the wooden box was still showing. "I'll send 'em running, remember?"

I loved her so much in that second I thought something in me was going to burst.

"Hey, Lily?" Clint had clambered over from his spot next to Frypan. "Room for one more?"

I nodded, smiling, but I didn't have time to answer before somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I turned and Gally was standing there - Gally, who I'd known for all of an hour.

"Why?" I asked, my own forehead creasing. From everything Thomas had told us about him, he didn't exactly seem like the self-sacrificial type. Gally just shrugged.

"Because it's the right thing to do. And-" He tapped his temple with one finger. "Because I remember. I'll tell you sometime."

I caught sight of Minho over Gally's shoulder, still sitting in the same position, his arms folded and his head down. Suddenly, he looked up and met my eyes. I didn't move, didn't want to make a decision for him that could put him in danger. But, as I stood there, not shifting my gaze away from him, he sucked his teeth, shot one final glance at Thomas standing by the Flat Trans and got to his feet, nodding and walking over to us and the group that was forming.

"For Newt." Minho said. "Because that was unbelievably shucked. That shit needs to stop."

"Thank you!" I couldn't stop myself from jumping forwards and hugging him, squeezing hard while he laughed quietly and detached himself. "Steady on, Pasteur - it's okay. Anyway, gotta look after my girl, haven't I?"

His sober expression cracked and he winked at Karly, who smacked him over the back of the head. "This girl can look after herself." She muttered darkly.

I thought that had to be it, but then Jorge put his hand on my shoulder and pointed over at Timmy and the gaggle of WICKED scientists he'd gathered around him.

"Can that fancy scientist of yours fly Bergs?" Jorge asked, raising his eyebrows sceptically.

I had absolutely no idea - my knowledge of Timmy consisted of his name, his position as a WICKED double agent and that he'd been my Dad's friend. If the guy could secretly ride a unicycle one-handed while juggling, I'd have been none the wiser. But, Timmy overheard Jorge's question.

"He can't." He called across.

"Then you'll be needing a pilot, hermana." Jorge gave me one of the few smiles I'd managed to wrestle from him. "'Cause I'm pretty sure my only family's coming right along with you."

As I spluttered my thanks, gratitude and something dangerously close to hope welling up in my chest, I cast a glance towards Brenda, still standing by the keypad on the door and she nodded vigorously, as if to say, damn straight.

That left Thomas, standing by the Flat Trans, his letter from Ava Paige clutched in his hand, his gaze fixed on the rest of us, clustered on the opposite side of the room, about to abandon the only plan he had on a chance from a dying man and for a second, he looked disappointed but he recovered in milliseconds, calling out:

"Okay - is that everybody then?" Thomas clapped his hands, business-like again and, as he stood there, it was quite easy to imagine his old career at WICKED, calling the shots for a thousand employees.

"Brenda, can you-" He started, but she was already there, typing in an access code. When she finished, a whirring sound filled the air, bouncing off the metal sides of the safe room and the edges of the Flat Trans became a little more distinct, shimmering with the blue light we'd all come to dread so much.

"Fifteen minutes." She cried, her tone just as firm. "Starting now. Pick up all your belongings and get moving!"

We all pressed back against the wall as the crowd crushed towards the blue screen, carrying and belongings, pushing to get through the veil, no more than two metres wide, as the timer on the wall clicked down. In some ways, this was almost more chaotic that running through the endless halls of the WICKED compound outside - it was long and rambling and exhausting out there, but in here - squashed against the cool metal of the chamber, clinging onto the people next to me - it felt like, if you just moved a centimetre, you'd be caught up it in the tidal wave and swept into paradise whether you wanted it or not. People were shouting and small children started crying as the technology 'ate' person after person, spitting them out into some kind of lush woodland on the other side, but Thomas was conducting some kind of line system, with Brenda on the other side, making sure that people stayed together and nobody got trampled under the stampede. I lost count of the number of people I pulled to their feet and ushered towards the door, whispering 'good luck, good luck' over and over again, hearing it said in return, having people press my hand and say they were sorry for my loss, but I was going into sensory overload, barely registering one face before the next replaced it - on and on and on until only the Gladers and our new team were left.

Gwen, Sara, Billy, Mike and Elle had already crossed through the portal into the Paradise it held, but Frypan, Harriet, Sonya and Aris stood in front of us, determination and sadness written across their faces and mirrored in ours.

"Guess this is goodbye then." Minho said, pulling Frypan into a hug and slapping him on the back. He nodded and looked across at me.

"I'm sorry, Lily. I just think - I don't know how to solve neuroscience. I can cook, with anything and -" He glanced towards the Flat Trans. "Who know, they might need that in there?"

I squeezed his hand. "That's okay, Fry. They'll be glad - good luck."

"You too."

I turned to Harriet. "You'll sort them out, Harri? Make sure they're all okay?"

I meant Gwen, Sara, Elle, Billy, all of the people we'd grown up with that we might never see again, but I also meant the hundreds of people who had been torn from their homes and sold into slavery, onto to be catapulted out of it and told to build a new life a couple of days later. I meant all of them and she knew it.

"You bet." She hugged us all, one after the other, closely followed by Sonya. "And you find that cure, Lily. Sort the bastards out, girl!"

"Will do." I smiled, the same sad smile that Thomas and I had shared - was that really only yesterday?

"You'll find us, right?" Sonya added quietly. "If you need us. Or if you find it? You've got the tech for that?"

"Promise." I said at the same time that Timmy answered, "Yes. That wouldn't take long at all, honey."

They nodded again and so did we, everyone trying to plaster smiles over grim expressions and heavy hearts, before disappearing through the shimmering air. The timer on the wall clicked down five, four, three, two, one and then the whole thing vanished, the blue sheen evaporating, leaving an empty protection chamber. Empty except for four WICKED scientists, seven renegade teenagers, a Berg Pilot and Thomas. He hadn't gone - and now the portal had closed.

We all turned to him with baffled expressions, Minho was grinning and Karly just raised her eyebrows at him and said:

"Well, Edison?"

Thomas sighed, but walked over to us, looking up with a smile that just curved the edge of his mouth upwards. "Well nothing. I'm in." He looked at all of us clustered in the enormous storage cupboard. "Guess I've got a family to protect too."

A Couple Of Hours Later - The Backstreets of Denver

It was dark by the time we got back to Denver. The city was lit by the full moon looming above us and streetlight after streetlight lining the empty sidewalks. There was no identification office to get past this time - the walls had been blown apart in chunks in odd places and we could drive straight in. It seemed incredible that Denver had been a working, normal city just a couple of days ago. Except it hadn't. The Flare had lurked under the government meetings and the bus routes and the daily commutes for months, if not years.

It had been a hell of a long walk from the WICKED compound to the fallen city - the Right Arm had taken all the vehicles we'd arrived in and buggered off, as Newt would have said. They clearly weren't expecting any survivors from our group - and, considering the sight that met us as we surfaced from the underground protection chamber, it wasn't that surprising.

Almost the entirety of the compound that had stood above ground had been levelled - the bedroom areas, the Common Rooms, the offices were all gone, lost somewhere in the seemingly endless piles of rubble. Rescue teams, broken glass, bits of wood and crumbling stone (don't think, don't think) were everywhere you looked, and as we stood there, it made me strangely angry to think that somewhere under all of that rubble and another hundred metres down were the two Mazes, completely intact and entombed along with their fallen occupants.

Timmy had fielded the questions of the rescue team, saying that we were a group who'd been on a school trip to the Interactivity Wing - we'd sheltered in a bunker, nobody was hurt and we were headed back to our minibus in a nearby village. Charlie even did a stellar job and started to cry - at which point the official was very happy to let us leave, practically ushering us offsite. The other team of scientists had found a training Berg and gone ahead to warn the team in the Andes, because the machine was only big enough for that many people. The Right Arm had refused our Berg for the rescue in the end, on the grounds that WICKED's radios might pick up one of their own machines, so ours was still at the abandoned airfield on the far side of Denver. Good news: with its full tank of fuel, the Berg could get us to the Project Electricity centres in Peru with only one stop, somewhere in what was left of Mexico. Bad news: we'd have to walk through the fallen city to get to it. But, as usual, we kept going because we didn't have another choice.

Denver that night was virtually unrecognisable from the city we'd walked through just a few days before. There were abandoned vehicles on every street corner, shops with shattered windows and stolen goods, and debris all over the roads. We walked in almost total silence, everyone unnerved by the occasional drawn out moans, scuffles and manic laughter that drifted across to us from all sides. We had no idea how many Cranks were camped in what was left of the city - the ones we'd seen so far had seemed otherwise occupied, hunched over some bloody prize, rocking back and forth and singing or just watching us walk past with wide eyes - but it was even more disconcerting that none of us were armed (except Charlie) since the Right Arm's plan had disabled all the weapons we had and we didn't bring any knives off the Berg in the first place.

Jorge was leading, but the city was unfamiliar to all of us, and however much he pretended to know where we were going, we were really just walking north continuously in the hope it would bring us out on the other side of the city as quickly as possible.

"How far away do you reckon we are now?" Clint whispered, after we'd passed an infected couple screaming at each other in an empty car park.

Timmy frowned. "I'm not sure, but considering how far we've all walked, can't be much more than a couple of miles, surely?"

Jorge just made a non-committal sound that really meant he had no idea, but it was easier to agree with Timmy than admit it.

"Good to know." Minho muttered. "'Cause I don't know about you guys, but this place is really starting to spook me. I'm okay with this distance from raging loonies, but we better not get any closer to 'em - 'specially not in the shucking dark."

The thought made a cold shiver run through me. I'd seen enough Cranks in the last few days to last a lifetime, and tonight, our chances in a fight didn't exactly look good.

"Well, we'd better be quick." Thomas chimed in. "If this place is anything like it was when I came through here yesterday - if it's worse, even - we wouldn't stand a chance."

Jorge finally spoke up, his tone much more relaxed that I could have managed right then. "Stop worrying, muchachos. If we just keep going this way., we'll make it out eventually."

We took a left by a ransacked bookstore, its glass front shattered and books spilling out into the road. The alley we turned into was darker still - there was only one street light - and looked like it was being used mainly as a dumping site, with trash bags littering the floor. The second we turned, we knew we'd made a serious mistake.

It was a dead end, and clustered at the base of the alley was a band of at least fifteen Cranks. There were people of all ages - some as young as fourteen, others about sixty - but it was hard to place some of them through the web of cuts and bruises on their faces. We hadn't heard them from the main street, because the noise the band were making wasn't like anything we'd heard from the other Cranks - no manic screeching, but fierce whispers, frantically talking over each other in harsh tones. With their lacerated clothes and their various injuries, these looked more ragged than the Cranks we'd seen in the Palace and I just hoped that didn't mean they were any more Gone. None of them had turned when we entered the alley and they seemed to be occupied with rifling through the piles of trash, sorting it into bags with more control than I'd expected.

"Come on." Brenda breathed, turning back towards the mouth of the alley. "Maybe they haven't seen us."

But, as she spoke, one of the Cranks towards the front of the band slowly pivoted to face us, an eerie smile on his face.

"Oooh, that's where you're wrong, dearie...wrong, wrong, wrong!" He sang, waggling his eyebrows in a way that would have been almost comical if we hadn't been unarmed in a dead end in the dark. "We see everything here, know everything, everything, everything."

The man looked to be in his late forties, if not fifties, what was left of his dark hair was peppered with white, and wrinkles were set deep into his forehead. He was wearing a green corduroy jacket with worn out elbows and ripped jeans, and he was swaying on his feet as he leered down the alley at us. At his words, a couple more of the Cranks framed their necks around, staring at us with wide eyes and shifting, restless gazes. I took an involuntary step backwards, closer to the entrance of the alleyway, and noticed some of the others doing the same. The deteriorating man just laughed, a rasping cackle that echoed off the brick walls either side of us and reverberated inside my skull.

"I wouldn't do that, lovelies, no, no..." He gave a wet snort. "See, we know these streets like the backs of our hands, and we're not quite Gone enough to forget 'em. You can run, lovelies, run, run, run, but we'll find you in the end. Sooner rather than later... I wouldn't do that..."

The man's fingers were drifting dangerously to the handle of what looked like a serrated knife in his belt. The fear that had kindled in my chest when we turned into the dark alley, was sending scorching sparks up into my throat, sharp and piercing.

"We're not going to hurt you." Timmy called, his voice cautious as he moved from the back to stand in front of us. "Do we look like Red Shirts?"

The man's snort of laughter turned into a full-blown guffaw, as he bent double, overcome by the hilarity of Timmy's statement, and the giggling gradually spread to others in the group until the alley rang with gasping laughter.

"You." He spat, staggering a couple of steps closer and sending us an equal distance backwards. "You bunch of weakling Munies... hurt us?! Ha! Ha! Do you hear me? HA!" He shouted, his wild eyes almost bulging out of his head with the force of it. "We'd have your liver, boy, before you could blink twice."

A wave of sniggers erupted from the band behind him as some of them hissed it back at us: 'ha', 'blink twice', 'have your liver, boy', 'HA!'

We exchanged nervous glances - Minho tilted his head back, almost imperceptibly, towards the entrance of the alley, but Jorge shook his head firmly, just as quickly. Any sudden movement with no distraction and they'd just charge straight after us with twice as many people, weapons and that terrifying single-mindedness that always seemed to develop in Cranks. We were trapped here until somebody came up with a plan or this guy started feeling generous - and I wouldn't have put money on either option just then.

"So you're not hurting and you're not running, lovelies." The empty smile was back on the man's beaten face, displaying a sickening myriad of technicolor teeth and gaping holes where some previous altercation had fallen through. "So are you staying with us, my pretty Munies? Come to play with the Crankssss..."

His words tailed off into a hiss as another voice barked from the back of the band. "Alright, leave 'em now, Cedric!"

The older man - Cedric - shrank from us, as though the words had flicked a switch in what was left of his mind, as the owner of the voice pushed their way to the front of the band and out into the No Man's Land of concrete between the two groups.

In that second, every fraction of air left my body and I forgot how to breathe.

The speaker was tall, taller than the others and I didn't know how we hadn't seen him before. His clothes were torn and smudged, with dirt and blood - I didn't want to think about whose - there was a wicked-looking dagger in one of his belt loops that swung as he walked, its edge coated in a dark rust. He stood with his shoulders back and his head held high, looking down at us. There were almost as many cuts and bruises marring his features as the people bunched behind him and his hair was matted with dirt and sweat and tied back from his face with a scrap of brown leather. Almost the same leather as the wristband on his left wrist with my name scored into it in black capitals.

It was Newt.

But it wasn't. It was his face, his body - the cut on his forehead above his left eye was even fainter than in the Crank Palace, its edges lightening into the pale white of a scar, just grazing his eyebrow - but that was all. His left shoulder was a mess of surprisingly white bandages and medical straps, but a faint crimson mark was seeping through the mishmash of layers anyway. That's not possible...Every muscle in by body had wound itself tight and it almost took a literal train of thought to rip my gaze away from the person in front of me and look across at Thomas. He was trembling, his face pale, staring at the breathing spectre with wide, terrified eyes. His lips were moving but no words were coming out - but that hardly mattered, because Newt didn't give us time to speak.

"Well, well. Look at this lot. Lost, are ya'?" His voice had an unfamiliar edge and his eyes - though they weren't wild like the first man's - weren't his. There wasn't a single flicker of recognition as he took us in, looking from one former friend to another with hard, black eyes. "Cedric's right, ya' know. This ain't no place for Munies out so late..."

Written like that, it could seem like advice. It wasn't. Newt accentuated the threat by smiling slowly and looking over his shoulder at the gang of lunatics who had fallen silent.

"Newt?" Minho finally managed to choke out. "What's this klunk about, brother? It's me - Minho! Your old pal? Are you honestly pretending you don't know who we are?"

Newt's gaze flicked to Minho and he frowned slightly, before pure scorn twisted his features, eradicating the uncertainty. "Know ya'?" He laughed and his head seemed to loll from side to side like it was on a hinge. "All you Munies look the bloody same to me. Should I?"

"Yes!" Minho's voice was strained, disbelief and pain filling the single syllable. How could we ever have thought that the Crank Palace was the worst thing that could happen? I've lost count of how many times this night has played in my nightmares in the years since - this was worse, a thousand times over.

Newt laughed again and it was a dull, hollow sound. He could have stabbed any one of us with that knife and it wouldn't have hurt any more than watching hatred, cruelty and derision fill his brown eyes as he replied. "You're just humans. Which is more than we are, I guess."

No. You promised you'd remember. Hot tears filled my eyes and he carried on.

"That's just what I don't understand, though. I've got the same number of limbs as you people - if a bit bashed up - I can speak, I've got the same cells, the same DNA. But those things-" He spun on one foot, teetering dangerously as he did, his expression suddenly angry and pointed at one of the faded Flare posters on the wall of the alley. "Say we're less than that. Less than the animals you find in those bins, just cause I've got a stranger livin' in my head and a few weird scars. Funny, isn't it, that?"

He isn't wrong.

"Hilarious." Jorge said, stalling. "I'm killing myself laughing, hermano."

The same eerie smile spread across Newt's face and he tilted his head to the side, looking at Jorge.

"Oh, don't do that. Don't spoil our fun." Newt raised his eyebrows and spun the knife at his belt around his fingers a couple of times. Quiet sniggers from his ragged posse. Somewhere huddled behind me, I heard Charlie's gasping sob. Oh, N. Please don't remember this, love. If you ever come back, please don't remember this.

Bizarrely, I wasn't afraid. This wasn't fear, this was something above fear, pure horror as we stood there in front of the shell of the boy I'd fallen in love with as he'd spun under a star-spangled sky, pulling new constellations out of a brilliant mind that was being eaten away. Stop thinking. Stop, please. I needed every shred of control I had to get out of this place, but I couldn't stop the tears that spilled over my cheeks at the venom in his voice, the first lock on my mind collapsing.

"It's us - N, please!" My voice was thick and the desperation was just as obvious. I knew it was useless, Newt - my Newt - wasn't there, but I couldn't ignore the impulse to turn his mind from whatever monstrosity his mob were set upon. "This isn't you. Don't do this."

"D-do what?" He spun towards me, his tone sharp as he met my eyes, but for a millisecond, his voice faltered. "Survive? That's all I'm trying to do, Princess."

I'd made him stop. He didn't know me, didn't know any of us, his memories and his love for us kept prisoner by the virus tearing through his cells and his sanity, but I'd made him stop. If I could get him to do that again...

"Well, all we're trying to do is get back to our Berg. We don't want any trouble...Newt." Timmy's voice was calm, placating and his hands were out in front of him, showing Newt they were empty, that we posed no threat.

"Stop calling me that!" Newt shouted suddenly, throwing his hands up to his ears, the one with the knife in coming dangerously close to grazing his forehead. But his distress, his inward battle, was over in seconds and he lowered his hands and said, in that impassive, calculating voice he'd used before:

"Well, well, boys. Just gettin' back to their Berg. Maybe we can help them?" He was speaking to them, but he was nodding somewhere over our heads. That doesn't make sense...

I twisted around to the back of our group, a sick feeling of foreboding creeping in, and we were surrounded. While we'd been talking, focused on Newt, some of the Cranks had snuck around behind us, completing the ambush and now they were at our backs, brandishing their knives and various garden hoes at us, sneering at us and sniggering - but they were still watching Newt, waiting for him to give the word. Suddenly, I was back on the sands of the Scorch, a staff in my hands, one of thirty women surrounding a bedraggled group of Gladers and Newt was staring at me with wide, clear eyes.

"Now, now, boys." Newt, in my present, grinned at our predicament and I felt sick. "Gettin' ahead of yourselves, ain't ya'? Get back over here - Ralph, Lyle!"

"No fun, Isaac, no fun..."

Isaac? Their faces fell and, grumbling darkly as they trudged back to the main group, Newt cuffing the stragglers across the back of the head and sending them stumbling into the others, who hissed and pushed them right back. This was probably a mistake on the part of one woman - the man she'd shoved swung his rake back and brought it down against her skull with a hollow thud. The woman collapsed to the floor shrieking and the girl next to her launched herself at the first man, clawing at his eyes and shouting as he screamed obscenities at her and swung the rake around wildly.

"Hey!" Newt shouted, the veins of his neck corded as he tore the rake out of the man's hands and flung it aside, where it struck the metal trash cans with a clattering boom "Stop it! Hey!"

Newt pulled the struggling Cranks apart and pushed them to opposite parts of the crowd. "Acting like bloody animals ain't gonna save you in this city! Who's calling the buggin' shots here?!"

The Cranks fell silent and just looked at him, some of them cowering back from the six-foot tall man snarling at them. "Then bloody act like it. You'll have your chance."

Newt leading a band of lunatics. Newt - who'd always hated being anybody's boss, who led by persuasion, by compassion, who despised losing his temper for reasons I'd soon remember - screaming at people like imbeciles? It isn't him. It's his body, it's not him. The people that matter will always know.

Newt pivoted round to us, his arms folded like he was considering Timmy's words again and his head listing to one side, jerking strangely as a muscle in his neck spasmed.

"See, under normal circumstances, I'd love to let ya' leave. But thing is, you're Munies - the lovin' universe's decided you're better than us, and we can't have that." He said, his cold voice laced with an undertone of threat.

Cedric appeared at Newt's shoulder, leering again, his gaze sliding between Karly, Brenda and I. "They bleed the same." Cedric whispered.

Newt smiled archly, raising his eyebrows and nodding. "So I'm told." He pulled the knife out again and flicked it between his fingers with dexterity he hadn't possessed on the Berg last week.

Timmy tried again, only the slightest hint of panic in his voice, but they were laughing at him now. "Boys, we don't want any trouble with y'all. You said it yourself, we're not here to mess with you, we just want to keep moving, okay?"

Newt's smile mutated into a sneer, his dark eyes narrowing. "Okay? No, I don't think so. You Munies had your chance out there. This is our town now."

We had to get out now. Unless we wanted to be cut to pieces by maniacs with garden equipment and deny Newt the only thing he'd truly wanted - for us to make it out of this place. We had to get out and spare him that. It was the least we could give him now - we'd failed at everything else.

And I had an idea. A terrible idea. An idea that N would have hated. But, as Thomas had said just a couple of hours ago, it didn't look like we had another one.

Quickly, I turned to Thomas and whispered in his ear. "I'm going to do something really stupid and I don't care what it costs me. But when I snap my fingers, you're all gonna run. Okay?"

"What? No!" He hissed. I met his eyes, trying to remind him of the night before - the stupid things I'd forgiven him for - and I didn't let him question it.

"Trust me, Tommy."

He frowned but, after a infinitesimal hesitation, nodded. "Okay. Okay."

So, trying not to think about how horrifically dangerous this idea was, I made myself put one foot in front of the other and make my way across the expanse of concrete separating us. I heard Charlie, Timmy, Karly call out to me, but I couldn't look back. I kept my gaze fixed on Newt, who had unfolded his arms and was watching me get closer with a mixture of surprise and alarm, holding the rusted knife out as if to ward me off. Some of his dark blond hair had fallen out of the leather band and his eyes were dark and full of suspicion, with none of the burning emotion they'd held when I'd done almost this exact thing in the Crank Palace.

Come on, N. Come on.

"Whadd'ya think you're gonna do, Princess? Your guy's as good as told us you've got no weapons." He sneered it, but he didn't look as sure now. I was only a couple of feet away. The Cranks behind him didn't look that concerned about protecting their leader, just peering around him with interest from a distance of a few metres.

I paused about a metre in front of Newt, took in the blood and the scratches and the torn clothes. His arms had started to tremble, but the sneer was still on his face, his eyebrows raised and his mouth pulling up at one corner. "See you around, Backstreet Boy" - this wasn't what I meant. As I stood there, for what can only have been a couple of seconds, I wondered how much time I'd have to regret this. But then I moved forward, sidestepping the knife and standing so close that I could hear him breathing, and I answered:

"This."

And I kissed him.

Newt froze. His lips were cold and chapped by the cold wind that ripped through the abandoned labyrinth of a city and I felt something spasm through his body, bringing him closer, his lips finally moving against mine. I slid one hand up to his jaw, keeping his head still, and very deliberately, reached behind me with my other hand and snapped my fingers, two, three times, praying that Thomas would do as I asked, that they'd understand. Please run.

Through the shrieking, cackling shouts and vile innuendoes of the Cranks at the sight - I could only hope they were as frightened of Newt as they'd seemed - I heard Thomas yell:

"Run! Go! Are you crazy - run!"

The sound of shoes clattering across the cobbles followed it, getting further away and the Cranks hissed and moaned, but I didn't sense any movement from their side - they were waiting for N to give chase. As I kissed him, my mind was simultaneously running at a million miles an hour, every sense at maximum capacity, and completely silent. This was about escaping - for us and for him - and if I thought about the enormity of what I was doing, if I allowed any of our memories in, any of thousand moments better than this one, then I might have collapsed then and there. The last time we'd kissed like this had been on the Berg, the night I'd felt a new kind of heat smouldering through my body, but that night in Denver's backstreets, the only burn was anger - at WICKED, at the universe and maybe a little at Newt, though he was the last person that deserved it - why can't you stay? Don't make me leave you here. But I knew the truth, as much as that only fuelled the fire. Gently, my eyes still closed, I took Newt's hand - unresisting now - and guided it up to the pendant at my throat, feeling him run his fingers over its smooth surface. Do you know me now?

A trembling second passed by before Newt let go of the lizard and lightly brushed his fingertips across my cheek, cupping my face so gently he was barely touching me.

"Linnet!" Timmy's voice, too close. They couldn't come back.

I stepped away from N, my stomach twisting, not knowing what - or who - I would see in the face looking back at me. Was this where I paid a price for their escape? But Newt was staring at me, all of the malice, the suspicion, the anger of a few minutes before evaporated, as if it had never existed - and he just looked stricken. Newt looked exhausted and his face almost seemed to hollow as he looked at me. His brown eyes - because they were brown then - were misted, the disease not retreating all the way anymore, but he whispered:

"Lily?" His fingertips were still on my cheek, but his hands were shaking, his brow furrowed, like the realisation was fragile, that it was taking all of his effort.

I can't describe the feeling that crashed through me in that moment - almost euphoria, mingled with rising hysteria - and a wobbly sensation started in my legs, like I could fall.

I nodded. "Yes. Yes!" laughing with relief in the biting night air. I grabbed his hand and twined my fingers through his, and he squeezed them, reflexively. Mirroring him, I reached up with my free hand and rested my palm against his cheek, making sure I met his troubled, clouded eyes, making sure that he saw me in the seconds that I had.

"You're one of the good guys, remember? This isn't you, Newt. Do you hear me?" I don't know how I kept the tremor out of my voice, when it felt that everything in me had been ripped out of place and tangled until I could hardly breathe, could hardly think, but Newt nodded, the frown never leaving his face, his hand tight in mine.

"I love you." I breathed. Yet another place I shouldn't have to tell him in. Yet another place where anything like love didn't seem possible. Newt didn't answer, but I thought I saw something change in his eyes, a flicker of russet shining in one of them as the moon passed from behind a cloud above us.

"Linnet!" Timmy couldn't be more than a street or so away now. I can't leave you again. "Lily!"

My breath shuddering in my lungs, I pulled Newt's hand closer and pressed my lips to it.

"I'm so sorry..." I whispered. And this time when I ran, I didn't look back.

Don't think, don't think, don't think, I chanted silently in time with my feet on the cobbles as I sprinted around corners, trying to reach where I'd last heard Timmy's voice. Every corner looked the same - had there been a bin on that last one? His eyes - don't. Don't think. There were figures crouched under every lamppost, their bodies hunched over, and none of them looked at me as I flew past them, my focus wrenched between finding the others and keeping the bolts on my imagination and the mounting hysteria that was raging behind the door I'd erected.

I turned left by a skeleton post office and there was a tall figure in the middle of my path, shadowed by the clouds of the evening and the harsh glare of the street bulbs. I tried to stop, but skidded into him.

"Lily!" He cried.

I screamed in terror, trying to scramble backwards, but it was Timmy, his fingers digging into my upper arms, holding me in front of him.

"Are you okay, honey? Lily?" All I could do was nod. N, N, N. Jeremy, Daddy, N. It was like a pounding inside my head, and adrenaline and exhaustion and fear were making every muscle in my body quiver.

From somewhere behind us, the moans and whispers of the odd Cranks in this street started to be eclipsed by shouts and screams from further away:

"This way this way, ha! HA!"

"We'll have your liver, boy..."

"No, this way this way. Ahahaha, run, run, run!"

"Shit, they're coming." Timmy's expression darkened and he started bustling me down the street, not letting go of my arm. "We're this way, Lily - come on now, let's go, let's go!"

I let him drag me until we staggered out into a new street and I saw all the others pressed back against an empty AMC theater, its lights sparking, out of the way of the streetlight beams. Karly reached out to me on sight, but Timmy was already shouting at them and frantically gesturing down the street.

"No time - they're following us! We've got a head start, that's all, guys, we gotta go now!"

So we did. We ran and ran, everybody stumbling over kerbs and broken glass, everybody listening out for the all-too-familiar cackling shrieks. Corner after corner, everything merging into one, half of my mind back in the Maze, the cracked walls covered in ivy and scuttling beetle blades. We ran and ran and my vision was blurring, until Minho suddenly hissed: "Shuck it!" and I had to refocus, blinking until I could see where we were.

It was another dead end. The wall ahead of us was easily ten feet tall with jagged barbed wire decorating the top. We'd have to turn round - but the time advantage we had was terrifyingly small and we didn't know how close the other group were. If they saw us, we wouldn't have a hope in hell of escaping unscathed. It wouldn't take much more noise and many more recruits for our band of pursuers to become a mob, and ten weaponless Immunes weren't going to be any match for a mob of lunatics with unnatural strength and a desire for violence.

"What now?" Clint's face was white as a sheet as he gripped Minho's shoulder, but the other boy just shook his head and moved back in the direction we'd come from.

"It's okay." Minho said. His breaths were shallow and it wasn't from the running. He beckoned us closer to him. "It's okay. It's just like the Maze with the shuck Grievers; we check before we run, if it's clear, we'll just take a left and end up back at the Berg in a few streets. It's okay-"

But a lingering moan cut him off, followed by a shrill of laughter, ricocheting down to us. There hadn't been any Cranks in that street. Nobody, could move, frozen to the spot as we listened and the noises grew louder - and solidifying into words.

"Run, run, run, lovelies..."

"Where'd they go, where'd they go? Pretty Munies!"

"Ooh, I'm good at Hide and Seek, my lovelies yes, yes."

"MOUSETRAP! Somebody shrieked and they all dissolved into gasping laughter, like it was the funniest thing they'd ever heard.

"Where'd they go, where'd they go?"

They were too close now. There was nothing in the alley behind us, nowhere to hide, and if we tried to escape the passaged they'd almost be able to touch us before we could run - and they knew the way. It would be Russian roulette in reverse, all but one chamber containing a bullet. We were dead. And yet, there wasn't any fear left in me - this city had bled me dry. Jeremy, Daddy, N. N. But Charlie's arms had slipped around my waist, squeezing hard and I mechanically rested my hand on her head, stroking her hair. I'm here.

"Left." Another voice shouted, with less of the wild abandon than those who had spoken before us. "They had to go left. Right don't go nowhere. Airport, train station all left."

A chorus of voices took up his words in a chant. "Yes, yes, left, left, left!"

Charlie started to tremble against me. They were metres away now. A left anywhere around here would bring them straight to us. We were dead.

"No!" Somebody called. I saw Minho and Thomas start, their recognition as strong as my own. The voice was Newt's and we barely had time to register it before he was shouting again. "No, no! Have you all passed Gone already? Why the bloody hell would they go left? It's right. We gotta go right, if you want to catch 'em."

What? This seemed to confuse the mob and some of them started to mutter "right, leftrightleft, right, left, right. Gotta go, gotta go."

The first man tried again, a note of confusion and petulance in his voice. "I'm telling ya', Isaac, there ain't nothin' but the power station out that way. It's left. Left, left, left."

"And I'm telling ya' it's right. Now who's running this group? We all know what happened the last time you led a hunt."

It was definitely Newt, but it wasn't anything close to his harsh, wild tone that had been so sickeningly alien in the first alleyway. This was Newt's voice - if glacial, laced with anger and maybe something close to fear. He laughed coldly, maybe trying to deter the man's determination, but something about it rang false.

"But, Isaac-" The man whined, and there was a dull thud, as if he'd stamped his foot on the floor, but Newt didn't let him finish.

"There's no bloody but about it, Lyle! Go shucking right before I throw ya' that way."

There were odd, tittering laughs, under the sound of shuffling feet away from us, the sound of people obeying the orders. They couldn't have been going fast enough.

"Go!" Newt screamed, his voice echoing off the walls and the metal plates of the Netblock receivers on the buildings. "Get out of here!"

Was that for them or us?

The shouting and the laughter and the moaning got further away as we huddled there, barely breathing. When everyone regained control of their bodies enough to look at each other, there were a few long seconds where nobody spoke. Brenda found her voice first.

"He's protecting us." She breathed and Thomas nodded, a deep frown creasing his forehead and his eyes glimmering slightly in the moonlight.

"And we don't know what that just cost him." Thomas replied, gravely. "Let's get out of here."

Nobody argued.

"We're nearly there." Karly gasped as we turned sprinted past a dark supermarket, throwing errant carts out of our path. "I remember this bit from when Jorge brought us in."

I didn't. But I wasn't looking, wasn't seeing. I was running and running and following the others and trying, desperately trying not to think about the way my father had looked, broken on the floorboards of the WICKED compound, the way blood had seeped through Newt's bandages as he stood, his fingers on my cheek - no, no, no. No, please. Just run. Just run.

Corner after corner after corner, nobody speaking, nobody stopping to look behind, just running and running and running. I was dimly aware that my hands had started to shake, that the unstable sensation I'd felt with Newt was spreading through my body, making me stagger as we made it into view of the Admissions Office, the walls of Denver looming before us, the searchlights extinguished on their brows and the doors of the entrance torn off and cast aside by the stampede of people trying to escape.

'Are you sure you don't want me to follow you to the doors?' Newt's voice was so clear in my mind that I actually turned, but the only thing there were a couple of browning leaves being batted through the air by the wind that was getting up as we ran through the hole that the doors had left. Yes, I wanted you to. But I couldn't. I had to protect you. But I couldn't. I could never protect you.

"I'm so sorry." I whispered, my vision blurring as my eyes started to sting. "I'm so sorry..."

"Lily?" Charlie was running next to me as we hit the concrete of the airfield, the Berg appearing on the horizon, it's black metal coated with dust. I wonder if that was what Noah's ark looked like. Charlie's voice was concerned, but I could only make out the outline of her face and her wispy curls blowing in the wind.

I nodded vaguely in her direction as everyone started to sprint. A strange pressure had started up in my chest, like my lungs were made out of industrial rubber, like it took everything in me just to get in one breath of air. I couldn't think straight, everything in front of me was blurring into one, the concrete of the airfield merging with the indigo of the sky. Stop it. Stop it, Lily. We're nearly there now. We just need to get on, we just need to get on the Berg, close the doors and then we can get out of here.

'Get out of here! I'm going to shoot if you don't go!"

My foot caught on a dip in the concrete, just a few hundred metres away from the Berg entrance and I went crashing to the ground, tearing my hands and the skin of my knees on the jagged concrete. There was blood welling on my fingertips, on my palms, one bead slowly forming on my fingertip and rolling down my index finger to my wrist.

Newt, standing in the middle of the bedroom, blooding pouring through his trembling fingers, his eyes not seeing me, not seeing anything.

"Why did I do that, Lily? Why did I do that?"

And I screamed, the sound finally tearing from my threat, tearing like everything else was tearing, tearing at my memories, at my heart, body. People moved closer to me, but I didn't see them, didn't hear them.

"Well, we can't all talk like the bloody queen, Princess!" But you nailed it. You were so good at my voice. I could never copy yours, but it didn't stop you trying to teach me. "My name's Newt, by the way...it's nice to meet ya', Lily."

My whole body was shaking, the blood from my hands on my face, on my lizard as I curled up on the concrete, tears mingling with the streaks of blood, sobs racking me, but even then, the screaming didn't stop. I couldn't stop, my throat burned, my chest ached, I couldn't breathe, but I couldn't stop because I couldn't stop seeing them, him, couldn't stop hearing.

"If they can rename a bunch of teenagers, why can't we rename the buggin' sky?" A sky with more stars than you can count, a night that should have been cold but wasn't. A boy with almost infinite hope that the universe didn't share. "I feel like I could scream and no one would hear me...I guess I'm not afraid anymore."

"I'm scared, Lily." And I couldn't protect you. I'm sorry, I'm so sorry. "It just hurt so much, Lil."

I was fourteen, fifteen, seventeen, nineteen all at once - at a compound, in a forest, on a roof, on a Berg, in a burning bowling alley dark with smoke, in a Denver backstreet lit by the moon and the glaring streetlights. Everywhere but on a dark airfield, screaming until it rang off the metal of the Berg, until my vision was so black that all I could see were the places in my head.

"We're gonna get away from here, go somewhere WICKED will never find us. Daniel, Newt, Linnet, Lily, Isaac, Birdie, damn it all, we can be whoever we buggin' want, without anyone tracking our brains, without any zombie disease, without anything else. Promise me, Lily?" And I'd promised, but I lied and so did you. And so did they. I wish it was the truth. It's a lie, but tell me again. Please tell me again, N, I swear I'll believe you. I'll believe anything. Just tell me again.

"No matter what bloody happens to me, I'll always be around to bug ya'. Forever - okay?"

"If I'm gonna die, I'd rather die free."

I'm running across a roof at two in the morning, I'm dancing round a starlit Canteen, standing on your feet, I'm suspended on a climbing wall, I'm flying in an aerial routine and I'd fall if you didn't catch my wrists, I'm in the Common Room singing with you, I'm watching you on the floor of a crowded train and it's all you, you're everywhere, you're everywhere, because that's how it always seemed. You're a lightbulb. Everybody saw you. You let me see.

"What chance does a London street kid have of living up to the guy who discovered buggin' gravity?"

"Who, for the love, is Pythagoras? There were four questions on a Greek god in a bloody maths paper!"

"I told ya' didn't I? Only lovin' magic around here is me!"

Your face at that moment, the way you laughed at us - I can hear it. His voice was the only thing reaching me, even though the Berg was starting up, even though the others were shouting and screams were still ripping from my chest.

"I could die and no one would even notice. No one would know who I was and that terrifies me."

"I want to do something worthwhile, be something worthwhile, rather than some homeless teenager who died of the Flare."

I will never let you be that. I'll die before I let you be that - everyone needs to know who you are. To know what happened here. To know how much more than that you are. I promise, I promise and I swear I won't lie this time. I swear.

In that moment, in however many minutes it was on the dusty concrete of Denver airport, all of the pain that I'd held back since the Maze, since my father left, since the diagnosis, since the Berg, since the Palace, the grief that I hadn't let myself feel for even a second, finally crashed over my head and knocked me flat, drove me mad, temporarily obliterating whatever WICKED had woven into my brain, even more memories, words, promises swirling around me, crowding in on all my senses. The doors in my head hadn't just been unlocked, but blown apart, the iron splinters perforating everything else in my body until all I could do was curl up and scream with the pain.

"You - er - you clean up all nice and pretty, Water-Lily." Spinning in the starlight, I could hear your heartbeat, too fast, through your shirt.

"Do ya wanna dance?"

Because you can't do that. You can't shelve every feeling that isn't a smile, pretend that nothing hurts because life hurts. And you're strong enough to withstand that - the pain and the grief and the bad days - because, if I've learnt anything from the last ten years, it's how indelibly strong human nature is. How much one heart can take and not forget how to beat, how to love. Newt was a testament to that. So was I. So was Daddy. So were all of us. But you can't take it all at once, every bad thing that's ever happened to you - because that takes away the hope. And you need the hope.

"Get on with ya then, ya' buggin' criminal."

I could almost feel his fingers in my hair, on my cheek, my hand in his, his arms around me - safe, certain.

"Give them hell for me."

"I love you, Lilybird. 'S a bloody inevitable, remember?"

Yes, yes, always. Always. Stay with me, please. Don't make me leave you here. I love you, inevitably, irrevocably, I love you. I can't do this, I can't-

Somebody wrapped their arms around me - one across my back, one behind my knees, still seeping blood through the slashes in my leggings - and pulled me into their chest, picking me up and walking. A sharp edge of a badge dug into my collarbone. Timmy. His chest heaved in and out while he walked, like he couldn't breathe, like he was crying too. I was shuddering in his arms, the screams not sounding anymore, but my body still making the motion, jolting, but only a gasping whimper or a guttural sob came from my throat. Timmy shifted me slightly against him, using the thumb of one hand to brush my hair back from my face in comforting circles that did nothing to ease the burning.

"It's okay, Nettie. It's all going to be okay now."


	32. Nerves, Neuroscientists and Old/New Friends

**Chapter 32 - Nerves, Neuroscientists and Old/New Friends**

"The reason - the basic reason of millions - that all of this makes me so furious is that WICKED have it completely wrong. I'm sure of it. They've got thousands, if not millions of copies of reactions to Variables, of brain patterns, but the goddamn brain patterns aren't the answer. They're a symptom."

Dr Jeremy Serralier bites his lip and sits back in his office chair, frowning. "Think of it like this - if you're bleeding, you're not going to test the blood to try and work out why you're bleeding. You're going to find the cut and try to stem it, and if it stops bleeding, then whatever you did worked. We have to treat the Flare the same way - stop looking at the blood and find the cut. That could be at a decay level, at a mental level, even at a cellular level. I doubt it's molecular, or the Bliss would need to be far more streamlined than it is. Anyway, I'm digressing-"

He waves his arms around as he searches for his final point. "We could use the brain patterns, but only once we start trialling a cure. It's useless before that, and WICKED are devoting all their manpower to it-"

"Jem?" There's a shout in the background. It sounds like Timmy. "Doc? Little help here?"

Dad pulls a face. "What are you doing?" He calls back, twisting around in his chair.

The voice that comes back is a bit sheepish. "Um...you know that sample that you said to leave on the side? I, er, didn't - there's something weird with it, Doc, I'm serious!"

Dad laughs, his eyes wrinkling at the corners, and gets up, reaching over to stop the video. "Alright, T - I'm coming" and the screen goes grey.

I closed the tab and shut the laptop, putting the memory stick back in my chest pocket. I'd watched the videos that my Dad had left on the USB so many times in the two weeks since we'd left Denver that I could have rattled them off on request by that point, but I kept replaying them anyway - in the hope that I'd see something I hadn't seen before, that I'd work something out. And if not anything to do with the Flare, maybe in the hope that I'd notice something new about him, some quirk that I might have picked up, a gesture or a facial expression. Something I'd never have chance to rediscover for myself.

It was early morning when I slid my laptop back into my rucksack, raking a hand through my hair in an attempt to flatten down the bits sticking up on top and leaning against the window in my room. The sun was just peeking over the mountain range in the distance, the sky turning a myriad of colours - from amber to gold to pink to blue - as one of the farmers drove his herd of sheep through the narrow open square outside our undercover centre, so early that there was nobody to leap out of the way. I hadn't been sleeping very well lately. None of us had.

As soon as we landed at the Project Electricity bases in Peru - after we'd been bustled in and fussed over by Julie and her team of our four or five scientists who'd arrived a few days before us and a couple of others - we decided to have the rest of WICKED's devices removed from our brains. If we were really going to solve this mystery, find the Cure for this disease, then we'd need to give it everything we'd got and use every tool we had - and that meant every memory we had - anything that might help. Getting our memories back was a double-edged sword. It helped in a lot of ways, we remembered all the lessons we'd had on this sort of thing, Thomas remembered the intense training he'd had from WICKED, which made the hours we spent throwing ourselves into science and drugs and brain scans and molecules a lot easier. But that took time; everyone spent the best part of that day sitting on their own somewhere, not speaking, not eating, just trying to process the sensory overload that removing the Swipe created. It made things hurt more. It made you remember more reasons to love people - Charlie, Karly, Minho, Clint. My Dad. Newt. Reasons to forgive - seeing Gally with my memories back almost hurt more than the final pieces of the jigsaw puzzle I'd built of Newt falling into place. How had WICKED twisted that trusting, effusive kid into a quiet, scarred man so racked with guilt that he rarely slept for more than four or so hours a night? Who had been so bitter in the Maze that he'd driven almost everybody away from him? His room was above mine and I'd hear him moving around at three in the morning, at five, at one.

Something caught my eye out of the window and I turned, trying to see what it was. Caught in the tree just outside was a scrap of tattered blue cloth, fluttering in the morning breeze that was blowing down off the mountains. One of the memories opened up in my head again - a little boy on a creaking train, wrapped in layers on blankets, clinging to the last one with bitter determination and teary eyes. The same boy, sucking lollipops and dancing around me in a starlit canteen. Squeezing me in a corridor. "I'm your sister, silly? And I wanna be your first hug the second we all finish this trial. A proper break-your-ribs, pick-me-off-the-floor-hug. Do you promise?"

Winston. Minho told me he'd died in the Scorch, the night they hit the city, blown apart in an electric storm. Another bruise that goes all the way down to my soul, and will probably ache for the rest of my life. But it's things like that - the love and the anger we had for people like Winston, people like Newt - that got you out of bed in the morning, into the labs, into the villages, that kept you fighting the battle.

After watching the scrap for a while and copying out yesterday's notes as I perched on the sill, I turned away from the window and ran down the stairs, out into the sunlit street as the village started to wake. The shutters were starting to swing open and the sound of people calling out to their neighbours filled the air, along with the general clatter of the shopkeepers swinging their tables out for the day, setting up their signs and their produce as customers already started to mill about.

"Buenos diás, Lia!" I spun to see an ageing woman in a bright shawl bustling down the street to the food market. She gave me a cheery wave and a sunny smile that lit up her lined face. I grinned back.

"Buenos diás, Rosa! It's already looking busy today!" I replied. My Spanish was awful, but Rosa was determined to drill the basics into us before we left Peru. Rosa was a shopkeeper a few houses up from us, but she was one of the few people who had openly welcomed us into the village - she'd visited us on the first night, decided that we'd all been criminally underfed and made it her business to look after us as long as we stayed here.

"Ah, yes, yes - busy day, I think. You work today, Lia?"

I nodded. "Yes. Timmy, Jorge and Freddie have almost got our new machine up, so it's pretty busy up in here too."

Rosa shook her head at me, wrinkling her nose in faux disapproval. "You and your flashing machines," she muttered. "I do not understand a word they say."

"Well, that's just the problem." I laughed, her teasing criticism ironically close to the truth. "Neither do we!"

Rosa gave me a sad smile. The people in this village knew who we were - Flare scientists - but their reception had largely been kind. The whole of the Andes had been badly ravaged by the Flare, and everyone left in this village - and in many in the area - were Immunes. Some had sick relatives, but they kept to the far edges of the villages, out of the way of the rest of us and the mutual danger meetings could cause. Rosa had lost people too.

"You will do, cariño. You will do. Time, time, time." She assured me. Time, I thought. Wasn't that the one thing we'd lost entirely? My smile must have mirrored hers because she reached out and patted my cheek. "You work, then you tell your nice friends to come see me later, yes?"

"Of course! Thank you, Rosa!"

When I eventually got into the main Electricity building, Julie was sitting at the breakfast table with Thomas and Charlie. Charlie had tanned in the weeks we'd been there and her curls had been twisted up in a plaited bun on top of her head as she told Julie about the trip she was making with Clint and Freddie - one of the other scientists - into the neighbouring village later.

Thomas looked tired and I wondered how long he'd stayed in the lab last night - when I came away, it was dark, but he'd still been cracking samples out of the cases and mixing extracts, barely looking up when I called goodnight. Back on the Berg, on the way out of Denver, it had taken me more than a day of drifting in and out of consciousness on one of the Common Room couches, crying and muttering, to recover from whatever had come over me on the airfield. And though Thomas hadn't ever had a breakdown on that scale, he'd had moments where the memories were so vivid he could barely speak, barely move. The guilt and the pain of everything that had happened was crippling, and getting our memories back had only made it worse. We all felt it, but Thomas felt it most. The pain of organising a group like WICKED, that could torture innocents needlessly in the name of science, and of course, the guilt over everything that had happened to Newt.

"I shot him." Thomas had murmured one night in the Commune Area, his voice distant. "How can he be alive? I shot him."

"Yeah, you shot him, you dolt." Minho had answered after a long pause. "You shot him in the freaking shoulder. Didn't you see those shuck bandages? Looked worse than I did when I tumbled outta the Scorch."

Thomas looked up and frowned, slowly making the connection between the bloodstained bandages and the smoking gun.

"Didn't anyone ever teach you that if you wanna shoot, you gotta aim?" Minho continued.

"I did!" Thomas shot back. They were talking about this so normally - as if they were debating nothing more than a soccer match - that it was hard to believe that they'd been brawling about it just a couple of days before, the bruise still purple around Thomas' eye. It was awful, really, that talking about him dying was easier than talking about what happened in the alley. Which, I guess, Newt had always known it would be.

"I aimed, 'course I did, but I- I couldn't look. I thought I was close enough, and I closed my eyes when I did it." Thomas paused and look a long breath, only glancing at Minho. "And call me a shuck coward again if you want, but I couldn't look back."

Minho just nodded slowly and muttered. "I'm not calling you anything."

Thomas didn't seem to hear him. "So I even failed him in that." He whispered, before getting up and leaving the room, pulling the door closed with a bang.

"Thomas!" Brenda called after him, standing too, but Jorge pulled her back down.

"Let him go."

Clint was the next person to speak. "Do you think we could have helped him?" He asked, quietly.

That was it. That was the question that made what would have been guilt anyway - whether N had died or not - really burn. He was alive, and we'd left him there. Common sense told me that we wouldn't have had any more luck than in the Crank Palace, that it would have been even more dangerous with him the way he had been that night, that it would have been the last thing Newt would have wanted. But that didn't stop the voice scraping away at my conscience, whispering 'what if...' So Clint's question hurt. But Timmy didn't let anyone answer it, didn't even leave a gap for us to think about it.

"No." He shook his head emphatically, looking around the room at the exhausted, injured teenagers he was suddenly charged to watch over. "No. Do you hear me? I've seen enough people get sick - people I loved get sick. Okay? There was absolutely nothing you could have done. He had a knife and a band of lunatics and from what you've told me and what I've seen of that boy - long before he got sick - there's no way in hell he would ever come with you, even if he'd been conscious enough to consider it."

Timmy stood up, making sure we were all looking at him, that we were all listening. "You've gotta stop blaming yourselves, all of you. He's a good kid, and a kid that doesn't deserve what's going down, but so are all of you. Blame WICKED, blame God, hell, blame us if you want, but quit blaming yourselves. If ya'll'd tried anything with those guys, you'd have been treated to something way worse than a Launcher blast. And he wouldn't have wanted that, would he? So cut it out. It feels harsh, but we've gotta focus on the Cure now. And where we're going."

And he was right, of course, and we all nodded, though none of us would ever manage to obey completely, but Thomas - who hadn't even heard Timmy's words - had made the science the focus of everything. He wasn't known to the people outside the centre at all and still needed a map to get around the village - even now he was eating cereal with one hand and scribbling notes with the other while Charlie talked over his head.

"Because Freddie says we don't want to harass people because that might make them upset, and we have to be nice and smiley and give people leaflets, so they know we're not evil like WICKED, and then they might help us so we can help them?"

"Where're you going, Charl?" I asked as I slid into the seat next to her and helped myself to some Rice Krispies and orange juice.

"Lily!" She spun around and smiled. "Freddie's going to take me and Clint around the villages today so we can meet people, and tell them about us, and then we can try to get volunteers!"

"That sounds fun, honey! Volunteers?" I looked up at Julie with slightly raised eyebrows. "Are we starting that now then?"

We'd been testing different concentrations of Elpis on simulated tissue technology for weeks, to try to pin down the formula, and it felt like we were close, but even with that technology, it didn't mean it would work on human cells - and we couldn't test that without human volunteers. Julie nodded at me in answer to the question.

"We've got to start now - hopefully we'll narrow it down to the closest few concentrations this week, and the new imaging machine should be ready by lunch, according to Timmy, which should give us a boost in terms of what additives we need for this thing to really work - we're close now, Nettie." Julie smiled slightly, something like hope in her eyes - an expression I'd never seen from anyone at WICKED. The Project Electricity team always called me Nettie or Birdie or whatever else my father had called me - and, because of that, I never corrected them. "And the sooner we've got the volunteers at the Centre, the faster we can find what works in real time, rather than on a simulation."

"Who's on what today, Julie?" Thomas asked, barely looking up from his notepad, his brow furrowed. She regarded him with a look of concern that flickered into compassion before replying:

"Well, you're on a roll with concentrations, Thomas, so we'll leave you there until we need you with any volunteers," Julie rolled her eyes to the ceiling, trying to remember the rota Timmy always sketched after dinner. As determined as the Gladers were to find as much of the Cure as we could, it was nice not to be running things 24/7. "Karly's still on blood with me, 'cause I'll need help with the samples we got in last night. Gally's on connections and support now the Netblock's up again. Charlie's off with Freddie and Clint to the villages, and Minho's looking at alternative drugs with Timmy and Mary. What did T put you on, Birdie?"

"Drug observation again, until the machine's up," I sighed. I was unbelievably frustrated with drug observation. We'd gone through almost all of the known formulas time after time, but nothing other than Elpis seemed to do anything other than temporarily stalling the disease. "But I'm not sure we're going to find anything until we can get that machine to work."

"Ah, early morning pessimism!" A new voice chimed in. "Nothin' like it." Timmy was leaning against the doorframe - he looked tired too, but there was a wide smile on his face as he swung into the room. He ruffled my hair and did finger guns at Charlie as he took his place next to Julie and stole a raspberry out of her bowl, pulling back before she could slap his hand.

"What makes ya' say that, Birds? 'S not like you." Timmy asked, his teasing expression gone for a second. That was something else that had been new for us here - saying things and being taken seriously by the adults around us. Timmy genuinely wanted to know what I was thinking.

I leant my chin on my hand and wrinkled my nose. "I just don't think any of the other drugs are going to show anything on their own. We've tried them all too many times for that - it can't be a fluke. I think some of them might if we combined them with Elpis, or administered them afterwards, but we haven't got enough time or samples to go through them all again."

"And what're you thinking about the machine?" Timmy continued.

I'd planned this out in my notebook last night, after trying unsuccessfully to force my notes into some kind of answer, and I wasn't sure it didn't sound ridiculously basic or just plain ridiculous saying it out loud. "Okay, so Elpis works at the perfect concentration, right? Dad established that. The Flare doesn't get any worse, the virus itself stops being detectable in the blood, and the brain damage repairs really slowly. So we need another drug that's going to speed up the repair and make it an actual Cure rather than something that just stops people dying."

The others nodded - we'd been through all this before. But then I got to the part where my brain always stopped working, the part I could never get past.

"But to know how to repair people's heads, don't we need to know what the damage is? Finding the cut, remember?" I glanced at Timmy, and he smiled, pleased I'd remembered Daddy's metaphor. "We haven't got that yet - the brain patterns don't show it, just like Dad said. But if we had better imaging, we could find out what the disease actually damages and then we could narrow down the drugs. Is what I'm thinking, T..."

I let my voice trail off in surprise as I noticed the way Timmy's eyes were sparkling, like a kid on Christmas morning, like he couldn't wait to cut me off.

"Spot on, baby." He said, suddenly leaping to his feet again, discarding breakfast entirely and grabbing a banana from the fruit bowl. "But, in that case, just call me the fairy godmother, because your wish is granted, my lady."

Timmy pointed back to the door he'd come through, leading to the labs, and I flew up from the table and clapped my hands in excitement, running towards the door with Charlie on my heels. Even Thomas looked up from the notebook he was scribbling in and called: "Wait, really? You've finished the machine?"

Timmy was beaming, that ray of hope that we'd all started cherishing lately burning behind his eyes. "You bet'cha. Now stuff that breakfast down your throat, Edison, and get your ass moving. I didn't get up at the crack of freaking dawn to watch you eat cereal one flake at time, buddy. Let's fire her up!"

A Few Hours Later

The lab was alive with noise - even more so than usual. Mary, James and Kimmie - three of the WICKED scientists who'd decided to help us - were hunched over tablets at the far table, looking at the animations the new imaging machine had spat out of the brain tissue in the different areas of the mind as the Flare progressed. Thomas was clattering around with glass tubes and observation equipment and Gally was writing email after email to organisations and governments, attaching our research and appealing for funding and consideration, the sound of the clicking keys bouncing off the walls and mixing with the whirring of the machine and the excitement in the air.

"Jem was right," Kimmie muttered, replaying the video from a slightly different angle. "It's all about the electricity. The areas that the Flare kills-"

"Like the empathy and coordination zones?" James broke in, circling something on the tablet that sprung up on the others' screens.

"Exactly - they're not getting any electrical signals through them at all. It's all just dark. There are hardly any processes going on in those cells."

I leant over her shoulder and pointed at a denser collection of cells at the from of the brain that had gone dark on the video, far darker than the rest of the brain. "That's the aggression centre, right?" I asked. "Why's it so dark?"

Mary tapped her tablet pen against her lips and answered. "All the blood and nutrients is going there - it's engorged, that's why it's that colour. All the electricity's headed there too, which is why aggression is so predominant in the infected."

"But why?" It didn't make any sense for the virus to just direct the blood there, and aggressive behaviour itself couldn't create that effect. Something about the disease had to be doing it. Mary gave me a slightly exasperated glance and replied.

"We don't know, Linnet. Somehow we've got to get that thing to tell us." She pointed over her shoulder to the machine that Timmy was firing instructions into, sending the results to every computer in the room every few minutes.

Hmm. I perched on a chair on the other side of Kimmie and looked at the brains again. Something was itching in the back of my head, like whatever I was looking for was a thread I couldn't quite get through a needle eye. Why were there more nerve signals going to those places?

Suddenly, my father's words from that morning sprung into my mind: "We have to treat the Flare the same way - stop looking at the blood and find the cut. That could be at a decay level, at a mental level, even at a cellular level." Well, we'd looked at in terms of decay, which traced it back to the brain, we'd looked at the brain tissue - a mental level - and that had showed where the electricity was going but not why. Which left...

"Timmy!" I cried, springing across the room to the neuroscientist, still fiddling with the goggles of the machine.

"Hey there, sweetheart." He smiled at first, but then he saw my expression and raised his eyebrows. "What's up?"

I wasn't wasting time "Can you increase the magnification on that machine?"

"How'd you mean, honey?"

"Can you get it to show the individual cells rather than the tissues? It's just - I was watching Dad's videos this morning and I couldn't help thinking-"

Timmy's eyes lit up. "I know the one," He laughed, though his eyes were a little sad. "I almost blew up the lab that day. But, sure, Nettie - I was waiting to see what y'all made of the tissue first. Do you wanna see healthy ones or infected?"

"Can you put them next to each other?"

"Yeah, just let me-" He rattled some code into the computer and it buzzed and flickered until two images appeared on the screen, looking like a strange type of snakeskin. "There ya' go, honey. Don't break it."

I stepped up to the machine, not entirely certain what I was about to do with it. The problem, and all of the symptoms of the disease, seemed - from the tissue observation and the brain patterns - to relate to electrical signals going to the wrong places at the wrong time. So we needed to look at whatever cell parts had anything to do with nerve signals - come on, WICKED Advanced Biological Science courses. Don't fail me now.

I took hold of the controls and zoomed in so that one healthy nerve cell showed up on my left and one infected nerve cell on my right - both from the aggression centre. At first, I saw nothing at all. They both had nuclei, neither cell seemed deflated, and the calcium vesicles (which made electrical signals possible) were there in both of them. So what was it? I caught sight of a button labelled 'simulate nerve signals on screen' and pushed it, watching the cells. To begin with, the same thing happened in both of them: the calcium vesicles and chemicals stimulated the nerve signal in both cells and it started to conduct along the length of the cell. But then, in the infected cell, the voltage seemed to die off - by the time the current reached the end of the cell, the light on the screen was dim, compared to the bright white of the healthy cell. Strange.

"Thomas?" I called. "Can you come here a sec?"

Without taking my eyes of the screen, I heard the younger boy put down the glass equipment on the workbench and felt his hand on my shoulder.

"What is it?" He asked.

"Look at that," I pointed at the lights onscreen. "The voltage just dies. It's, what, a fifth of the healthy one?"

Thomas nodded slowly, a frown furrowing his brow. "But why?"

"I don't know," I murmured. "It can't disappear, right? First rule of energy - you can't create or destroy it. So it's getting out somewhere."

"Zoom in again."

I did what he said, but made sure I zoomed in on the edges of the two cells. This time there was no question about it, and I felt my heart jump in my chest. In the healthy cells, the outer layer of the nerve cell that insulates it, keeping the electrical energy in - the myelin sheath - was completely intact, smooth and thick all the way along the nerve cell. But in the infected cell, the myelin sheath was barely there - it was there at the start of the cell and the end, but everywhere between there, it was ripped apart, gaping holes running all the way along it. I turned to Thomas and his eyes were as wide as my own.

"I'm going to play it again." I said quietly, and Thomas just nodded as I pressed the button.

As I thought, the electricity surged through the infected nerve cell but, as soon as it hit the holes in the sheath, the electricity went crackling out into the nearby cells, draining from the nerve cell and reducing the voltage almost entirely.

"Timmy? Look at this!" I shouted and he was there in a second, Kimmie and James behind him. "I mean, you might have seen it, but..." I played the simulation, and once again the electrical signals shot out of the infected cells, lighting up the nearby cells in the aggression centre. Timmy stood there in silence for a few seconds, his fingers resting against his chin - slightly stubbled from the rush of the last few days - and his eyes fixed on the screen, before gently taking the controls from me and playing it again. He zoomed out, clicked on another cell, further away and tried again. Then another. Then another, as the rest of us stood with bated breath. When that one finished, he just murmured under his breath:

"No, Nettie. I hadn't seen it. I definitely hadn't seen that." He spun around to Kimmie and James, whose expressions were suddenly just as animated. "The goddamn myelin sheaths... of course! So, the virus is releasing some kind of chemical thats digesting the sheaths and breaking down the insulating layer! Jules, get in here! Oh, that explains - of course!"

Without warning, Timmy suddenly turned back to me, picked me up off the floor and whirled me around, the lab spinning and blurring around me, but when he set me back down, my head spinning and my heart beating double time, Thomas was still frowning. "But could that account for everything with the Flare, T?"

The neuroscientist just grinned, putting one hand to his forehead, his eyes distant. "Yes!" He replied, his voice almost disbelieving. "It could...it really could. The Flare is a completely mental disease that directly causes other types of deterioration, including physical, we've known that for years. But if the sheaths are breaking down in the aggression centres, then electrical signals aren't passing through the centres, so things like co-ordination, empathy and memory aren't getting the signals that should be going to them, because they're being prematurely released, and that's overstimulating the cells in the feral centres, like aggression, making the sick person act on those too often. All of the symptoms - the shaking, the anger, the involuntary movements - it could all go back to errant electricity in the brain! Fucking hell, Jem. Fucking hell, you were right all along."

Timmy's eyes refocused on the troop of white-coated scientists in front of him as Julie crossed the room towards him. "Go on then!" He cried. "Go, go - test the theory. Try the different parts of the brain in the same way, try it on the brains on Elpis and the ones on Bliss - make sure it's the sheaths. Well, what are you waiting for? Go!"

They scattered, almost running back to their workstations and tapping the instructions into the machines with an urgent intensity that hadn't been there before.

"What now?" Gally asked softly. I hadn't noticed him appear next to me, his emails abandoned on the sideboard. "If it is that. What do we do now?"

"If it is the sheaths, we need to find what will repair them," Julie replied. "And what will protect them. From the tests we've run before, I think Elpis probably does both. It almost certainly hardens the existing sheaths immediately, but rebuilds them far too slowly. We need something that will do it faster, something that will rebuild the fats in the sheath."

"Julie?" Karly's voice now. She'd come from the blood testing room and still had a crimson vial in her top pocket. "Have we looked at that protein we found? The one in Immune blood?"

"No!" Julie laughed suddenly, sounding as confused and overwhelmed as I felt. "We haven't tried anything, and all of a sudden, we need to try everything!"

"It's just-" Karly continued. "Didn't that protein spit out fats or something into cells? Could those be repairing sheaths in Immunes constantly so the sticking virus can't get in? Like it contains it or something?"

There was another long silence as Julie and Timmy - the only real neuroscientists in the middle of a group of determined teenagers desperately playing at it - looked at each other, a silent conversation passing between them.

Timmy didn't answer Karly's question directly, but gave another slow nod, wagging his finger at her as a thought pieced itself together in his mind. "That protein did secrete fats, or at least stimulate their production. We just didn't know why that would help until now. Julie-"

Timmy was doing it again, snapping between moments of silent, deep contemplation and wild activity, excitement taking over his whole body. "Do you remember that drug, Perseonin? From the 2050s radiation crises?"

Julie did. I could tell as all her features lit up and she ran across the room to our industrial refrigerator, as the rest of us just watched, baffled expressions on the faces of all of the Gladers. I hadn't even heard of the radiation crises, forget a drug created for them. As she scrabbled at the back of the refrigerator, she called over her shoulder: "Yes! We've got some somewhere, a donation from a corporation in Europe."

"What's Perseonin?" I asked, tapping Timmy until he came out of his head long enough to answer.

"It's a drug created to protect people from radiation poisoning when a ton of nuclear plants blew up in the 2050s," Timmy replied, perched on a bench and hammering away at the nearest computer keyboard as he talked, a list coming up on the screen. "But, if you're right, Karly - and you could well be - Perseonin works in a similar way to the Immune protein, it stimulates fat production, forming a protective layer around cells. If we could get it to do that for the fats in the sheaths, and then combine it with Elpis, then we could..."

He hit send on the keyboard and let his voice tail off, like he was almost frightened to voice the incredible outcome that was beginning to feel more and more like a possibility with every second that flew by, every chime of the scientists' tablets. Timmy stood up then and looked at us all with his best attempt at a serious expression, his arms folded, but his eyes were sparkling with excitement.

"Right. Don't know why you're all still standing there, soldiers. All hands on deck now, kiddos! I've just sent you a list of all the tests we need to run - hop to it!"

My hands were shaking with adrenaline as I put test after test into the new system, my heart beating too quickly and my mind spinning, the same two faces coming into my mind over and over.

We've started something now, boys. I just hope we can make you proud.

Two Weeks Later - The Volunteer Centre, Peru

"God, Lil, I'm so freaking nervous!" Karly was bouncing up and down on her toes next to me as I leaned on the windowsill of the observation glass as Freddie, Jules and Timmy made the final preparations in the testing room. "This is stupid. Is it stupid?" Karly asked, a small frown creasing the spot between her eyebrows.

"No," I answered as Freddie signalled to me to turn up the lights in the testing room. "I'm nervous too. This is it, isn't it? The moment of truth. Gosh, I hope it's worked. Please let it have worked."

When Clint, Freddie and Charlie had walked out to the nearest village a week ago, they'd got a mixed reception, collecting addresses, good wishes and some abuse as they went along, but in one house on the outskirts of the village closest to the mountains, the reaction had been very different.

Beatriz Fernandez, an elegant looking woman in her late thirties, beautiful but worn, had thrown herself at Freddie's feet when he'd explained why they were there - to find volunteers for our drug trials for a potential Cure. Her twelve-year-old daughter, Sofia, had caught the Flare on a school trip about a year before - a camping escapade gone horrifically wrong. Beatriz, a single mother, was Immune herself and had kept Sofia locked away in their house on the outskirts while her condition got steadily worse, doing her best to care for her terrified little girl, to give her the most peaceful descent she could manage, away from the Peruvian authorities and their versions of the Crank Palaces. But the deep scratches on Beatriz's face, the scars on her neck and arms, told the story she couldn't bring herself to. It had got to the point where Sofia no longer recognised her, would fly at Beatriz every time she entered the room, clawing at her, screaming obscenities until her throat was raw. The inside of Sofia's bedroom door had deep scratches all the way down it, so like the claws of a wild animal that it made me shudder when we went out to collect her. Beatriz begged Freddie, in tears, told us she'd try absolutely anything to get her daughter back - and if it failed, if something went wrong, then maybe it would be better that way. Neither of them could keep living like that - neither of them were living.

When we went to collect Sofia later that night, she really was sick - worse than any of the ones we'd met in Denver. Timmy tried to open the door and speak to her, but he came out with nothing more than a shallow cut on his forehead and a worried expression.

"She threw a shelf at me. A freaking shelf, poor kid."

But she was better than any of the Cranks we'd seen in the Scorch, which could only give us hope, if fragile hope. We'd decided to sedate Sofia immediately, just to get her out of the house and into our Volunteer centre, where she'd been for the last fortnight, unconscious, while the drip in her arm fed our combination of Elpis and altered Perseonin into her veins, trying to repair the damage the Flare had done to her mind. The drug should work the same whether the patient was conscious or not - if it worked at all, as we were about to find out. Today we were waking Sofia up.

Karly, Minho, Gally, Clint, Brenda, Thomas and I were all positioned in the observation room in front of an enormous glass panel, the controls for drug distribution in Clint's lap, waiting for instructions, waiting in case they needed backup, in case we needed to rescue Beatriz. In line with that thought, there was a soft knock at the door, making us all jump, the weight of the moment putting everybody on edge.

"Miss Lia?" Beatriz asked, in her soft voice, her face creased with worry and dark bags under her eyes as she leant against the doorframe of the observation room. Immediately, I slid off the chair and went to her.

"Hi Señora Fernandez," I gave her the best reassuring smile I could muster, knowing that - however sick I felt - she must feel like screaming. This little girl was her whole life, her reason for living. Beatriz looked so frightened that I took her hands in mine and told her. "Sofia's scans and blood tests have been positive, you know. We can't find any trace of the virus left in her body. In medical terms, she doesn't have the Flare anymore. It's only the damage and the process we can't be sure about."

Beatriz nodded, and I saw a flash of the woman she must have been before this tragedy, as she put her shoulders back and raised her head high, her lips pressed together, bracing herself. "Thank you, Lia. Where should I be now?"

"Just outside that door - don't worry, I'll take you." I stepped out of the observation room with her and started walking towards the testing room where Freddie was waiting, an equally reassuring smile on his face. Freddie was fairly young - older than Timmy but younger than my father had been - and though beads of sweat stood out on his dark skin, he looked far calmer than I felt.

"Good morning, Beatriz! Jules is just taking out Sofi's drips now. After that, it should take her about half an hour to come round completely - after being under for that long, and weak to begin with, it won't be instant - and if we're sure she's stable, then we'll bring you right in. Is that okay?"

She only nodded again, giving Freddie a smile so minute that it barely existed, but a smile all the same. Freddie was by far her favourite. He turned to me then.

"Nettie, can you tell Clint to power down the drip now, please? We shouldn't need you guys, but if we do, we'll shout." Freddie rested his hand on my shoulder and got a little closer, so that Beatriz didn't catch his words. "Don't panic."

"I won't," I lied. "But I will tell Clint."

Freddie turned back to the control pad on the door and said, "Good job now" as I ran back to the others, leaving Beatriz with Freddie. She'll be fine. I only hoped Beatriz didn't notice the tranquilliser gun in Freddie's back pocket.

We sat in silence after the drips came out, the seven of us in a perfect line against the glass. All of our eyes were fixed on the tiny, frail girl, swamped by the huge bed we'd put her in and lost in the mass of tubes and medical equipment as the sedation drug started to wear off. Sofia had the kind of build that already made her look delicate - fine features like her mother's, slim and small. Her thick dark hair spilled out across the pillow, the white of her blankets making her normally golden skin paler than ever. She reminded me of Charlie, safely next door copying out records, so much that it made my eyes prickle. What if that had been her in that bed? And even though it wasn't, Sofia was still someone's baby.

The minutes crawled by painfully as Julie sat next to the bed, stroking Sofia's hair as the fog lifted, murmuring to her constantly, waiting for any kind of response, but Sofia was only stirring, changing her position in the bed and running her hands through her hair. Eventually Clint spoke - no louder than a whisper, even though we were alone in the room:

"What happens if this doesn't work?"

"It does." Gally said shortly. "The kid doesn't have the Flare. We know that already."

"But what does that mean?" Minho pressed. "Okay, yeah, so she's not going to get any worse, but she was raving before. If it hasn't fixed her head, even slightly, then that's not going to be much better than what we shucking started with."

"Yes, it is." I replied. "If she's not getting any worse then we can try again. And again and again and again until something does work."

"Okay." Minho said. "And if it does?"

"Then she goes home." Karly murmured, her eyes still on the little girl.

"And us? What do we do?" He asked.

"Tell everyone!" Thomas was shaking his head as he answered fiercely. "Tell everyone, make the governments get off their selfish butts and do something about getting it to people as soon as possible. Try it again and again and make it better, make sure this wasn't just a fluke, get it exactly right. We can't just-"

"Guys!" Gally barked, leaping from his seat and flicking the sound switch into the testing room. "Shut up and look at the girl!"

Sofia's eyes were open, huge and brown - and clear, if confused. The room was absolutely still as Julie started to say:

"Sofia, my name is-"

"Where am I?" The little girl pushed herself up on her elbows and scuttled backwards in the bed, her back thudding into the headboard, her eyes wide with fear as she looked around the room - yellow, with big windows and paintings on the walls. As she looked, her head tilted to the side in a strange jerking motion.

"Sofia," Julie's voice was kind. "Trust me, darling, you're safe. I'm just-"

"This is a - a hospital?" The girl's voice was heavily accented, and she was having to search for the words. Julie just smiled in response.

"Yes. It's a kind of hospital. Sofia, what's the last thing you remember, darling?"

Sofia's face screwed up in confusion and her eyes filled with tears. "I remember...my home. I was at home. But my head was hurting and I...I do not remember. I remember things from long time ago. But I do not remember!"

She started to cry and Julie moved up to perch on the edge of her bed, resting an arm around the tiny girl, pulling her into her and telling her: "No, no, darling, that's okay. That's okay. You've been very sick, Sofia, for a long time. You'll remember soon."

The girl was huddled into Julie's chest, so completely different from the virtually rabid child who had thrown herself at Timmy, screeching, who had scoured deep gouges in her mother's skin. Is it really possible? Has it healed her? I didn't dare to hope yet. She hadn't seen Beatriz.

"And..." Julie tried. "There's somebody here who's been waiting a very long time to see you again."

"Oh?" Sofia lifted her head from Julie's shoulder and looked towards the door. Julie met Timmy's eyes and he walked over to open the door for Freddie and Beatriz. As the door swung open, you could have heard a pin drop in the observation room, nobody even daring to breathe.

Beatriz came into the room slowly, as if somebody else was in control of her body, as if she was afraid of what she would find in her daughter's face but as soon as she caught sight of Sofia, trembling in the bed, everything broken about her vanished.

"Sofi!" Beatriz was already crying when the little girl screamed:

"Mama! Mama!" Sofia flew out of Julie's arms, stumbling across the room like a newborn faun and threw her arms around Beatriz's neck, sobbing so hard that her whole body shook as her mother picked her up off the floor and spun her around.

"Ah, Sofi! Mi bebé... mi bebé..." Their tears were mingling as they held each other, laughing and sobbing by turns, and it wasn't long before every Glader in the observation room had tears spilling over onto their cheeks too, the euphoria of the moment and the exhaustion of the last few weeks suddenly hitting us like a wall. It worked. Those two words were so enormous that none of us could manage to say them out loud but we all felt it, and that only made the emotion a thousand times more extreme as we jumped around the observation room, whooping and crying. Karly pulled me into such a tight hug that whatever air had been left in my lungs disappeared as I laughed.

It worked. The drug had healed Sofi.

"We cured her!" Clint shouted, grabbing Brenda's wrists and spinning her around and manically laughing. "Gordon Bennett, we've cured her!"

We'd cured her. Yes, Sofia's ticks were still there and so were the black scars, but they were lighter, so the rest of the scarring - in her head and her body - would fade with regular Perseonin and Elpis. We'd cured her. There was a cure.

I sat back down on the bench as a fresh wave of sobs washed over me, for us, for Sofi, for Beatriz, for all the people who should be here, who deserved this just as much as we did, if not more. For Daddy - whose baby this was, for Newt - who should have been trialling it at Sofi's side, for Jackson and Raven too, for Winston and Annabelle and George and Nick and Rachel and Teresa and everyone else that WICKED had sacrificed needlessly. I cried for all the lives they'd wasted and all the lives we could save.

"Ah, my angels!" A warm voice rang out as Rosa came bustling in through the doorway, pulling whoever was closest into her arms and kissing us, one after the other. "I knew you would do it! I knew you would help that little sunbeam." There were tears glimmering in Rosa's brown eyes too as she carried on. "You do what all of those men in their fancy suits could never do, yes? You save the world!"

She laughed and patted Thomas' cheek. He was shaking his head, but couldn't help the smile that was stretching across his face. "I don't know about that, Rosa. We're not quite there - this is just the start."

His smile got even wider as he realised the meaning of what he had just said. "This is just the start. We've got to send the formula everywhere, get all the top scientists on it, make it better, make it faster and make sure everybody can access it."

Rosa just grinned right back at him, not understanding everything he said, but his rare enthusiasm was infectious.

"Yes, yes, Thomas. You will make it perfect, cariño. And you-" Then it was my turn again as Rosa turned her sparkling gaze to me. "You find that pretty boy on your desk, yes, Lia? You bring him with you next time."

Something stuck in my throat as my gaze automatically went to the wooden frame in front of my laptop. The picture was of Newt, back at the WICKED Centre, one that Timmy had found on WICKED's intact system that we'd infiltrated as soon as we reached Peru. He must have been sick by then, but you wouldn't know. He was perched on a railing of a balcony that looked out over WICKED's simulated lake, leaning back on his hands, the sun filtering through the nearby trees and catching in his dark blonde hair, lighting strands of it gold. He was laughing at something Minho had said and his eyes were shining and russet. I loved that photo - a snapshot of a good hour before everything fell apart - but that wasn't what I was thinking then.

Newt had been alive when we left Denver. And now there was a cure. I watched the same wondering expression appear on the faces of my friends as Rosa's teasing words sunk in.

"Yes, Lia?" Rosa said again, snapping me back into the present. My fingers were curled around my lizard and I didn't remember picking it up.

"Oh, um - I'd like that, Rosa," I managed. "I'd really like that."

Rosa gave me a bright smile before disappearing out into the street again to spread the news, completely unaware of the seed she'd just planted. For a couple of seconds, nobody spoke - the shock of Sofi and of Rosa's words sending us reeling. Clint was running his fingers over a small biro doodle on the inside of his right wrist - a tiny black lizard that Charlie had drawn this morning, 'for good luck'. She'd given us all one, 'even though Lily has two' and every one of us was looking at them now.

"Do you think he's alive?" Minho asked eventually, his voice slightly hoarse, though he immediately buried it in a sudden cough. Nobody answered at first, and I'd have put money on the fact that everybody's mind was back in the street lit alley in Denver, replaying N's snarl, the total blankness in his eyes, the rusted knife, the pockets of lunatic gangs.

Thomas sighed, then took a half-breath in, like he had to start the sentence twice. "I mean, it's...it's not likely...is it?"

Even with a statement like that, Thomas' voice still rose on the last phrase, like he didn't quite dare to hope.

"Why?" Minho demanded and when I looked up at him, I could see the hope in his expression that Thomas was forcing back, the hope that had already flickered to life in me before I'd had the chance to react.

"Because-" Thomas was scrabbling now, still sceptical, and even though I knew common sense was on his side, I couldn't bring myself to back him up. "That place was crawling with madmen, he was injured and he - it's been more than a month since that. I just- I'm just not sure that he can be alive."

Newt was sick. Really sick. I knew that. Hell, that night in Denver, that kiss, his dark, emotionless eyes, had replayed in my mind nearly every night. But so had his promise, his whispered 'Lily?', his shout in his voice, telling us to run. There was a chance. And my father has taught me a lot about chances.

"Well, neither am I." I said, in a tone that didn't leave any room for questioning. "But we're bloody well going to find out."

Karly and Clint smiled, and Minho gave a sudden bark of laughter, clapping me on the shoulder with a grin. "Okay, first off, that sounds shucking awful in your accent, Pasteur, but second off, damn straight."

Even Thomas nodded then, a smile tugging at the corner of his lips. "Okay. Okay."

Before we even had time to say another word on the subject, the day flying from one thing to another, Julie appeared in the doorway. A wide smile was on her face and her face was as tearstained as ours.

"Hey guys," Julie laughed. "We just asked Sofi if she wanted anything and the first thing she said was chocolate."

We all looked back to the observation glass where Sofia was sitting on the bed chattering away to Freddie and her mother, waving her arms around and looking very much like a normal excitable twelve-year-old.

"Do we have any chocolate?" Julie asked.

I hadn't looked that morning, but Minho looked slightly sheepish as he answered. "Er, no, don't think so."

"I can run and get some, Julie," I offered, before an investigation could start up. "All the shops are open now."

She nodded gratefully, already halfway back through the door and heading back to the testing room. "Thanks, Linnet!"

When I ran out into the street, it was hot. The sun was almost at the top of its arc and the cobbles were warm to the touch. There were people everywhere, because it was market time. As I stood there for a second, letting the reality of the moment and everything that was going to happen after it sink in in the warmth, I noticed a patch of blue sky directly above me, a gap in the cloud that the sun had been trying to burn off all morning and I couldn't help whispering:

"Look, N, there's a hole in the clouds."

New York - A Month Later

After that day in Peru with Sofia Fernandez's recovery, everything started moving very quickly. We sent off email after email, phone call after phone call to governments and scientific corporations telling them what we'd done, sending them videos, brain scans, blood tests, everything we could to prove our story. We got volunteers from everywhere in Peru, everywhere in South America, testing our theory, altering the formula and every time we were proved right. Once the drugs are administered, the Flare virus itself is destroyed within days, but the rebuilding of a patient's mental system, getting rid of symptoms like the black scars and the physical ticks, getting the person to regain control of their own mind, takes weeks or even months depending on the case. After a couple of weeks and the story leaking into international newspapers, there was no way the governments could carry on ignoring us.

Then, every top ranked scientist in what was left of the world started working on a base of Elpis and Perseonin, trying to perfect the formula, trying to make it better, already altering it into a vaccination that could be distributed to entire cities as well as an antidote - now we'd devised the base drugs, that took only weeks rather than months. In a strange way, even after everything we'd seen, it was watching this international onslaught against the Flare that showed us Gladers exactly how deep the claws of the disease had gone into the world's population, how terrified governments were. Within weeks, centres were appearing in every major city, medical teams being sent out to rural areas, administering vaccinations to everybody still left - thousands and thousands of people volunteering all over the world to help the cause. And somehow, I couldn't help wondering what would have happened - or rather, what would never have happened - if the world had moved this quickly when the Flare first broke out. If every government hadn't merely dismissed it as some rural rumour, until millions of people lost their minds.

The eight of us, plus Jorge and Timmy, had flown out to New York as soon as the vaccination programs really started up. Peru was small, and the population after the Flare was tiny - huge areas of it were decimated like the Scorch. Though we promised Rosa and everyone who had helped us that'd we'd keep coming back, the world was wide, and there were millions more people that needed help. And why did we choose New York? There were a lot of reasons. Firstly, because it was a city that Jorge knew, that Karly knew, because she grew up in it. Because it was one of the first places to be hit during the Sun Flares, one of cities with the most rubble in need of rebuilding. And then because hundred of refugees from cities like Denver arrived in New York every day, shipped in by rescue missions. And we were clinging onto the chance.

That morning we were in the central zone of one of New York's secondary Crank Palaces. Most of the ones that hadn't been destroyed through Crank rebellion were being transformed into Flare Rehabilitation Centres for people recovering from the mental damage the Flare had done. The room had once been some kind of town hall, with a stage at the front, but now it was filled with people in long lines queuing up in front of vaccination tables. I'd already lost count of the number of people I'd vaccinated that morning and it was only twelve o'clock.

"Morning, Miss!" A young looking boy, about eleven, with floppy brown hair, green eyes and a 'Mets' jersey bounded up the steps towards me, one hand in his frazzled-looking mother's, pulling her behind him. "Can we have two vaccinations, please?"

I smiled at him. "Hmm, I think you might have to do three laps of the hall for that, honey."

The boy looked surprised but actually went to jump off the stage, but I leaned across the table and grabbed his jacket. "I'm kidding, I'm kidding! 'Course you can - least I can give you after two hours in line, isn't it?"

He spun back and gave me a blinding grin that suddenly reminded me of a boy on a train with the same hair that flopped into his eyes.

"Phew." He laughed and plopped down into the chair. "I've got track practice later. I'd be wrecked."

"What're your names, please?"

"Oh, Paddy Walters-"

"Patrick," His mother clarified with an affectionate eye roll. "His name's Patrick. I'm Fiona Walters."

"Oops," Paddy giggled. "Sorry - I always forget to say that to doctors."

I typed their names into the system, confirming their address from the card Fiona passed me, then turned back, putting my my finger to my lips. " Well, I'm not quite a doctor, Paddy, so it's okay - I won't tell them."

He giggled again as I pulled the needle out of the packet and daubed some antiseptic onto a cotton wool pad. "Roll your sleeve up, then, honey. This won't take a second."

Paddy's confident expression faltered as he looked at the needle and asked me in a slightly quieter voice. "Does it hurt much?"

"Nope." I promised. At that second, a sudden bang sounded from the other side of the room, where a white-haired man in a suit was blowing balloon animals to distract wailing under-fives. "Hey, what kind of animals are they making over there?"

Paddy craned his neck over the queues. "Erm...that's a giraffe, deffo. Then there's a sausage dog - cool - a snake, and - awesome, Mom is that a dinosaur? Wow, I've got to learn how to make one of those...hey!"

Animals listed, he'd spun back to me and registered the cotton wool pad I had pressed to the tiny pinprick in his upper arm and laughed. "You tricked me!"

I smirked right back. "And did it hurt?"

"No." He admitted. "Guess not. Your turn, Mom."

I quickly slid the needle into Fiona's arm - without the distraction of balloon animals - handed them both the regulation silver bracelets with VACCINATED carved into them and told them: "Now, it's really important you don't take those off, okay?"

"Ooh!" Paddy ran his finger across the lettering. "Are they magic?"

"No." I answered. "Though that would be super cool. They might stop you getting arrested though, which is also pretty cool."

"Ah." He nodded shortly, quickly strapping the bracelet onto his wrist and peering at the name on my shirt with a smile. "Well, thanks Lily! Bye!"

"Bye, Paddy!" I called as he went skipping off towards the doors and I handed Fiona the Vaccination Info Leaflet. "Enjoy track practice!"

As they went out of the door to the left I heard Paddy say to his mom, "Hey, does this mean I don't have to wear my mask anymore?" followed by an elated "Wahoooo!" as the door clicked shut behind them.

The next person was an elderly lady, probably in her early seventies. She gave me a kind smile as she sat down in my chair and gave me her name - Hannah Trentham.

"Do they have you on your feet all day in this place, sweetheart?" She asked, as I pulled out another antiseptic bottle and cotton swabs.

"Not all day," I smiled. "You're my last person this morning, then I get a break."

"Ooh, I won't cause you any trouble then." She chuckled as she rolled up her sleeve for me, though she still glanced nervously at the needle. I adopted my typical technique - distraction.

"Are you doing anything nice this weekend, ma'am? It's supposed to be warm."

A sudden smile lit up the old woman's face, deepening the laughter lines around her eyes. "Actually," she replied. "If all goes well here and I don't have a reaction, I'm going to go and visit my daughter."

"Oh, that's lovely. I'll be careful with you, I promise."

Hannah's eyes went slightly dreamy then, distant, as she continued. "Yes. They're Immune, you know, my daughter and her wife? So's my little grandson. Teddy. But Texas has a lot of Flare pockets, so I've never been able to visit them, being vulnerable myself - not until today that is."

Her eyes were shining when she looked up at me - with tears or excitement, I couldn't tell - and, as I cleaned the area with the antiseptic solution, I felt that rush again that happened occasionally working with the Vaccination teams. This thing, this drug that we'd found, it wasn't just some abstract chemical. It was changing the lives of thousands of people - real people - every day. We were. I had to blink back tears that were suddenly pricking at my own eyes to make the syringe packet come into focus again.

"That's amazing - I hope you have a lovely time, Hannah. I grew up in Texas!"

"Really?" Hannah twisted around to look at me with another kind smile as I connected the syringe to the bottle. "What part?"

"Austin." I replied. It had only come back to me recently - the rivers, the lakes and parks that weren't created by computers. Someday I'll go back.

"Ah, I met my husband in Austin!" Hannah's smile became slightly sad, but her eyes were still shining. "Austin's beautiful. My daughter's in Houston. Now, what brings you all the way up here, sweetheart? It's chaos, isn't it? All these rescue missions and Vaccination teams and rehab centres and news people."

I quickly pressed the needle into her arm as I laughed and answered. "Yes, but I like that - I like that I can help. My family's here now. And, besides-"

I looked up at the posters lining the walls of the hall. There were all the usual ones, advertising local shows, some giving details for local rehab centres, helplines etc, and every once in a while, there were A2 posters with the words 'Looking for Newt' in black lettering across the top, followed by the picture that I'd kept on my desk in Peru and another of Newt cross-legged next to Minho in the Common Room, tired but smiling at me behind the camera. Minho's and my number were printed at the bottom next to an appeal message.

"I'm looking for someone."

"Ah." Hannah followed my gaze to the wall opposite her and a look of immediate understanding crossed her face. "Was he your boyfriend?"

Was he? That still felt strange. Because he was, I suppose, but that word sounded flippant. Not enough to fit everything that Newt was - is - into it. But nobody else could understand that.

"Yes. Yes, he was. We lost him in Denver a couple of months ago."

Hannah's face was sympathetic as her gaze flicked to the bracelet on my wrist - IMMUNE - and I could almost see her putting two and two together, imagining what must have happened. "That must have hurt, honey."

"Yeah." Because what else could I say? Another word that wasn't big enough. "It did. It does."

I turned away quickly to find another cotton wool ball and a plaster and busied myself again, fixing up her arm. But she didn't want to leave it at that.

"That's an unusual name - Newt."

I couldn't help but laugh softly as I flattened out a plaster. "He's an unusual person. He owned it." I started typing her details back into the computer. "You're all done, I think. There shouldn't be any problems, but if there are, you can call me on that number or the organisation on that one."

"Thank you, sweetie." She took the papers from me but caught my arm. "Do you have a Facebook page for him? I know it's ancient, but things spread fast on there. There's been a lot of people coming out of Denver lately - I'll share it for you, see what I can see on there."

"Yes, there is!"'I smiled suddenly, touched by her kindness. "It's just 'Looking for Newt' - we've got an appeal and a funding programme on there. Thank you so much."

Hannah patted my arm and picked up her handbag. "That's no trouble. I hope it all works out for you, honey."

"And you! Goodbye!" I called as she disappeared through the double doors.

We'd set up the Facebook page for N and printed all the enormous posters on the flight to New York from Peru. We'd sent the posters to every major city between here and Denver, making sure the authorities knew who we were. We'd spent hours going all the way around refugee camp after refugee camp here in New York, putting them up ourselves. So far, nothing we'd heard had been genuine, but moments like that one, with Hannah and her promise, reminded me to keep on hoping.

"God, I think my thumb's about to fall off, baby." Karly gasped as she threw herself across my desk with one hand across her forehead. "You coming for lunch?"

"Sure - just let me pack this up and I'll catch up with you."

"Well, don't be long, Lils," Karly sighed. "I think Min's about to track down one of the guys from this morning, just to deck him."

"Why?" I laughed. Karly rolled her eyes.

"Some guy asked for my number, and I gave it to him. So, now Min's pouting - but seriously, Lil, you'd have given that guy your number. Hell, I'd give him my first born child, he's so fine-"

"Karl!"

"What? I wasn't saying I would - but he was cute," She hopped off the table with a smirk. "Now hurry up, I'm starving."

She swanned out of the room, her bag already packed up, and I was just turning to zip up my own bag when I felt a tap on my shoulder and somebody said:

"Um, excuse me?"

A boy was standing in front of the table, about the same age as me, tall with curly blonde hair and dark blue eyes. He was wearing a navy hoodie, horn-rimmed glasses and a worried expression. I hoisted my bag up over my shoulder and replied with a friendly smile:

"Sorry, sir, this desk's closed right now - there are a couple others still open, but I'll be here again at two."

"Oh, no, no!" The blond boy held his hands up in front of him, shaking his head with an expression that was oddly familiar. "No, I don't want a shot - I'm Immune."

He held out his right wrist and showed me the silver bracelet, identical to mine.

"Oh," I said, mildly confused. "Can I help you, then?"

The boy looked a little awkward, rubbing the back of his neck and he mumbled. "Er - I was actually kind of hoping you'd remember me? It is Lily Pasteur, right?"

What? I looked again at the boy, seriously this time, and I couldn't deny that there was something familiar about his face, about the way he was standing, but I just couldn't pin him down, work out which of my universes he was from.

"It's Olly," He told me, eventually. "Olly Goldsmith?"

His name completed the connection in my brain with a spark of electricity and I leapt up, clapping my hands. "Olly! Oh my gosh!"

Olly had been at WICKED with us, another one of WICKED's trial subjects, but he'd been Cut one year, just before Christmas, and never made it into the Maze. We didn't know what had happened to him, we didn't know - and weren't sure we wanted to know - what WICKED did with people who got Cut. I couldn't help running around the table and throwing my arms around him and he squeezed me back just as hard - WICKED was like that, thought they never realised the connections they created.

"Oh my gosh!" I cried again. "How are you? Where have you been? What have you been doing? We didn't know where they took you - we weren't even sure you were alive-"

Olly was laughing, holding his hands up again as I stepped back. "Steady on! I work here. I've been a guard here for four years, ever since they Cut me. That's what WICKED did with everyone who got Cut: you got shipped out to guard the Crank Palaces - well, as long as you were Immune, anyway."

A shadow crossed his face as I forced myself not to think about the people who weren't. "I'm, er, guessing you made it through the Trials, then?"

I forced a tight smile onto my face. "Well, I'm alive. So, yeah, I guess I made it through."

He nodded slowly, understanding better than most could, and gestured to the posters on the wall. "I'm sorry about Newt. He's a great guy."

I appreciated the present tense. "Yeah - thank you."

Olly peered at the details on the nearest poster, tracing the bottom line: last seen near John Airport, Denver and asked:

"Denver? That's pretty far. Why can't you go and look for him?"

"Do you think we haven't tried that?" I snapped. Because we had tried it, by then. And I didn't want to think about it - but that was no reason to be horrid to Olly, and I regretted it immediately, lowering my voice. "Sorry. We did. We got about a mile past the doors before we had to turn and run. It's a fallen city - it's not like the Crank Palaces in New York, Olly. Yeah, the people there are really sick, but the ones left in Denver have guns. And big ones. There's almost nobody sane left in some of those states - you can't send out civilian search parties like you can here, unless you want to die, and that's the last thing Newt would want us to do. It's a specialists-only zone, no better than the cities in the Scorch. That's why we're fundraising - we can't get in there ourselves, and we need to find him..."

I couldn't believe I was crying again. That made it, what, three times today? I quickly rubbed my sleeve across my eyes and adjusted the lizard pendant, running my fingers over the familiar grooves. Olly heard the strain in my voice and turned back, apologetic.

"God, no, I'm sorry, Lily. That was an idiotic thing to say - I can't pretend to understand what you guys went through with those people."

There was real hatred in his voice as he guided me back to the seats at the table, but it wasn't directed at me.

"I guess the thing I really wanted to ask..."

I looked up at him then and guessed the question before he asked it. "Jackson?" I murmured, feeling my stomach drop. Olly had dated Jackson way back in the WICKED training centre when we were all fifteen, and they'd been close friends before that. Olly nodded silently. I opened my mouth a couple of times and closed it, not sure where to start, and Olly shook his head and got to his feet.

"It doesn't matter." He said, his voice flat. "I thought he was probably dead, I just..."

"I don't know that!" I said, quickly, pulling him back down into the seat. "I don't know that, Olly. Jax was with us - he made it through the Maze and the Scorch into Phase Three. The last place I saw him was at the WICKED centre a couple of months ago, but...he got the Flare at the same time that Newt did."

Olly just nodded mutely again, his expression closed off.

"I'm sorry." I whispered.

"The WICKED Centre that blew up?" Olly asked.

"Yes, but I don't think he was there then. We searched the place before the Right Arm set off all the explosives, looking for Candidates. There was an attempt to break out by some of the others and he might have been with them. I don't know. I don't know. We don't have any pictures of him or I'd have put him on the posters too-"

"I do!" Olly cut in. "Is that weird? I do. We still had access to WICKED's NetBlock up until a couple of months ago, and I found some pictures of Jackson. I - I could send them to you, if that would help?"

"Great," I smiled at Olly, feeling a strange kind of friendship for someone I'd only been reintroduced to ten minutes ago, and scribbling my email address and mobile down on one of the prescription pads. "I can sort that tonight if you do. I could also put Jax down to be brought to the New York centre if they find him."

Olly leaned forward on the chair, pulling me into another tight hug. He smelt of aftershave and coffee, "Thank you!" before pulling back and running a hand through his curls. "I'm keeping you - I saw Karly outside. I'd better go, but I'll call you."

As he went to leave, I suddenly had a thought.

"Olly?"

He turned around to face me. "Yeah?"

"Where are you living right now?"

He jerked his finger back to the offices of the old Crank Palace and wrinkled his nose. "I've got a room in the barracks of the Palace. They're keeping us on in there for low rent so we can guard there when they turn it into a Rehab Centre in a few months. Why?"

I didn't think long about the offer. "Look...we're staying in a hostel at the moment, until we can get settled here, and I can - can sort out my Dad's will with my friend Timmy. But we've found some apartments not far from the centre - you know, near the parks?"

Olly nodded and I carried on. "They're really cheap, 'cause they're near the Sun Flare zones, but we're going to knock some of the walls through and make the apartments interconnecting. We all want to stay here - Thomas' got involved with a hospital round here, Minho's got a job interview round the corner and I'm going to train as a Flare specialist up at the big Rehab Centre on the other side of town and try to scale up the search for N. The apartments are huge - you could come with us, if you want? We'd be glad to have you."

Olly stopped and rubbed the bridge of his nose with a fingertip, pushing his glasses further up and stared at me for a couple of seconds, before a slow smile spread across his face. "Okay. Yes. Am I allowed to answer that quickly? Yes," he laughed. "I'm in. I really hate this place - I can't patrol for the rest of my life. I haven't exactly got an attachment to the Palace. As soon as I can hand in my notice, I'll come on up, if you'll really have me. I want to help, Lily."

I held out my hand with a hopeful smile. "To new starts, then?"

Olly grinned and shook it, leaving his hand in mine. "To new starts."


	33. Photographs, Phone Calls and Peppermint Hot Chocolate

**Chapter 33 - Photographs, Phone Calls and Peppermint Hot Chocolate**

**THREE MONTHS LATER**

It was two pm and I was tired.

My early morning shift at New York's biggest Flare Rehabilitation Centre had just finished, and I was walking home past the parks, watching all the office workers emerge from lunch breaks, the people running for buses and the children spinning on the merry-go-round frame, adding their squeals to the coos of the pigeons waiting for crumbs on the sidewalks. I'd been awake since two o'clock that morning - my shift, as an individual Flare supervisor in the Children's ward of the C Block, didn't start until 4AM, but I spent an hour working on 'Looking For Newt' and making calls.

When we arrived in New York, 'Looking For Newt' was just a poster title, just one of the tens of ways we were trying to find him, but gradually, more people like Olly had come to us, looking for help, looking for their friends, their family, and somehow it had spiralled into a missing person's charity and I found myself at the head of it. There were at least fifty missing people on our lists, we had three professional teams, each responsible for a different area - some paid, some not - searching for them. Every member of the teams had specific profiles to search for, and N was on all of them. We'd found people's daughters, uncles, parents, cousins, children, but Newt hadn't even shown up on a security camera.

It had been three months and we'd heard nothing. We'd had calls, tens of them, but nothing that could help, sightings and leads that just ended up dead, time and time again - and that was if they weren't prank calls to begin with. I didn't want to start believing that Thomas could have been right. But that day, while I was watching two children chase each other round the climbing frames, roaring and giggling, clashing two swords together like duelling pirates, my phone started to whir in my pocket. I fished it out to find an unknown number on the screen. Sighing, I rubbed my eyes and pressed answer. I'm way too tired for any teenage jokesters right now.

"Hello?"

"Hello?" The voice was a man's, deep and as unfamiliar as the phone number. "May I speak to Lily Pasteur, please?"

"Lily speaking. Can I help, sir?"

There was a pause on the other end of the line. "Actually, I was hoping we could help you."

I'd been hoping for at least a hundred phone calls. But I answered "oh yes?" , because my phone rang and there was a chance.

"My name's George Davenport and I've been travelling with my family for the last two weeks to reach New York. We've been in a series of Bergs and refugee camps, but we're currently staying in the West Park one until we can find permanent accommodation."

West Park camp? That was only about half a mile from our apartment.

"The reason I'm calling is because my daughter caught sight of one of your posters? 'Looking for Newt?"

"Yes, sir. We have a lot of posters, actually, we're a missing person's charity. Who was the poster for?"

I was scrabbling in my pocket for my notebook when he answered, and I almost dropped it into a grill on the sidewalk. "Ah, you do? No, I'm talking about him. The poster was about the boy. Newt. See, we're refugees from Denver. The reason my daughter noticed your poster was because she recognised him."

"You've seen Newt?" I asked. Something faltered in my chest as I tried to do the calculations in my head. If his daughter recognised him, then it's unlikely that N was dead when the family last saw him. And if they'd been travelling for a week, they'd have left Denver on about the 15th, which would give him time to move about ten miles, maximum, probably less, with his injuries and the maze that Denver is now...

"Yes." George Davenport replied, and his voice was firm, completely certain. "And lately. But if you're looking to find him, we need to talk to you as soon as possible. The story is too complicated to tell over the phone, but I - I'm afraid the boy is in serious need of help."

My chest twisted. I knew that. I knew that he had to be, if he was alive. It had been too long. But that was different to hearing it from somebody else.

"Alright. Thank you." All the traces of fog in my mind, left by the early morning and the bright lights of the Rehab Centre had evaporated. "Thank you so much. Where are you now, please?"

"Er-" There was the sound of whispered conversation in the background. "A little south of the Rokesmith apartments? Do you know them?"

"Yes!" I cried. That was only a couple of streets away from the corner I was standing on. "Do you know Mrs T's café at all, Mr Davenport? It's on the corner opposite the newer parks - the ones with the water fountains - just past the Serralier building?"

"The one with the blue painted front? Yes. Are you free now, then?"

"Yes - I've just finished my shift at the Rehab Centre a few miles away. If it's convenient, I could meet you at the café in ten minutes. I'll be the girl wearing a red duffel coat and navy boots."

"Alright. We'll make our way to you, Miss Pasteur."

Mrs T's Café

Mrs T's was a little café off the Main Street, right next to our apartment building. It was cosy, full of bright colours, sofas, soft cushions and warm drinks, and it had become a favourite refuge of ours ever since we'd first arrived in New York. Mrs T herself was a cheerful, bustling, lovely woman who had spent numerous hours sending her husband over to man the till while she chatted to the two or five or ten of us who showed up in her café at any one time, gathering all the neighbourhood gossip and handing out good advice - whether it was about which tram to take to get to the centre or dealing with boys, Mrs T was always there, life experiences at the ready, to sort us out.

That day, it was quieter than usual - the lunchtime rush was over, the tables had been cleared and only a few stragglers and the odd student were curled up in various nooks of the room, cradling steaming coffees. I picked a low but wide coffee table in the street-side window with two large sofas either side and sank into one of them, already twisting my fingers around each other. I'd texted Minho, and he'd answered immediately, but he was trapped at work until four. CALL ME. AFTER YOU'VE CALLED ROGER, CALL ME he'd texted back.

Oh, please tell me something good. Please. One of the little boys on the ward had ripped one of his scars open that morning. There was blood everywhere. But there were bandages and lollipops and after an hour of cuddles on my lap and honey porridge for breakfast, he'd been alright, even though his tics were worse than usual. The strange crossed wires of my shift and the phone call brought my brain back to Denver, the blood on Newt's shoulder, the way the tic in his neck had jolted his head to one side. Two parts Elpis, four parts Perseonin. That was all we gave them in the Centre now.

A warm peppermint hot chocolate appeared in front of me, alongside a raspberry cookie - both my favourites - and I looked up to see Mrs T smiling down at me. I hadn't even heard her come out of the kitchen.

"Oh! Thank you!" I said. Mrs T nodded, but her smile was concerned at the edges.

"Hello, darling. Are you alright? You don't look yourself today. You stepped over Brontë on the way in - he looked quite rejected."

I gave her the closest thing to a smile I could manage and, with a pang of guilt, called her spaniel, Brontë, over to the sofa and scratched his ears. "Ooh, I'm sorry, baby." I cooed before turning back to her. "I'm mostly just tired - long shift, long night. And I'm meeting some people for the charity in a minute, if that's alright? I suppose I'm pretty worried about that."

Mrs T frowned a little and sat down on the nearest sofa arm. She thought we should hire more people for the charity, that we were wearing ourselves out - and maybe we were - but she thoughtfully didn't choose that moment to mention it. "Ah. It's always alright, sweetheart. Difficult one, is it?"

I laughed, but I'm not sure there was much humour in it. "Oh, yeah. There's a family escaped from Denver who're sure they've seen Newt."

Mrs T had been there for us for as long as we'd been in New York, and she had eyes like an eagle and a mind that retained almost everything that passed through it - she'd heard our story more times than I could count, she had posters up on the cafe desk, and she knew exactly what this meant to us. To me. Her face lit up at my words, but fell back to concern almost as quickly.

"Oh, darling. Did they say how he was?"

"Not really. Just that they needed to see me as quickly as they could, that he - he really needs help."

The bell over the door suddenly chimed and a little girl in a green peacoat clattered in. She caught sight of Brontë the spaniel and squeaked with excitement, promptly sitting on the floor so that he would bumble over and sit in her lap while she stroked his fur. Then, the little girl looked up, as if she'd remembered where she was, and started looking around the café, peering at its occupants until her eyes lighted on me.

"It's you!" She cried suddenly, scrambling to her feet. "You're her - Isla, in here!"

She beckoned to another girl, slightly older, in a matching yellow peacoat just outside the door, who came in with two adults at her back - their parents. All of them looked tired - slightly worn, with that nagging exhaustion that had become so familiar to me over the last five years. This must be the Davenports.

Mrs T thought the same and got up off the sofa arm, leaning over to squeeze my shoulder with a reassuring smile. "Alright. There's got to be some good in it, dear. Shout if you need me."

"Thanks, Mrs T."

She disappeared back into the kitchen to sort some drinks for the family, as the man I presumed to be Mr Davenport turned towards me, looking me up and down, registering the clothing I'd described.

"Miss Pasteur?" He asked. He looked to be in his late thirties, with a couple of grey hairs mixed in with his thick black hair, and the odd wrinkle around bright green eyes shared by the little girl in the green peacoat who was already dancing around me.

"Yes, Daddy, look at her coat! It's got to be her!"

He gave her an affectionate glance, but tried to mask it with a frown as he steered her towards the nearest sofa. "Don't be rude, Savannah."

"Don't worry," I said quickly, aiming a smile at Savannah. "It is me - and call me Lily, please. It's - er - nice to meet you."

Mrs Davenport, a smaller woman with deep auburn waves spilling out from under a green beret, nodded as she waved at her family to sit around the table. "Yes," She replied. "I wish it was under better circumstances, Lily. I'm Lara, this is my husband, George, and our daughters, Savannah and Isla."

"Hi," I said as Mrs T came back with cups of coffee and hot chocolate that were gratefully received by the guests after the cool November air of the sidewalks. "I'm sorry to be so blunt, Mr and Mrs Davenport, but speed is so important in missing persons cases that I have to ask you immediately: do you have a postcode or an address - even a rough one - for the last place you saw Newt?

"Oh, er, yes. Exactly, actually." George Davenport pulled a pen out of his pocket and scribbled an East Denver postcode onto the back of a napkin, pushing it over to me. "That's it."

"Thank you." I pulled out my phone immediately and sent a photograph to Roger with the message, 'N's latest location, two weeks approx. Will call. L x'

"That's our home, you see," Mrs Davenport gestured at the postcode. "Back in Denver."

"He was at your house?" I asked, confused and a little worried. Cranks visiting those sorts of areas rarely ended well for one or both parties.

"Yes," Mr Davenport answered. "Because he - this might be better, Lily, if I tell the story from the beginning, if that's alright?"

"Yes, please do." I wrapped my fingers around my cup, trying to stop the sudden trembling. Did I want to hear this? Or would it be another episode of what happened to us?

Mr Davenport coughed, folded his arms and began. "We're a family of Immunes. We'd heard the murmurs that the Flare had started up in the city, but we'd had the immunity tests ourselves, and - naively - believed that to be the main threat eliminated. The city had plenty of Red Shirts and government officers, and we were reassured that any infected would be removed to the Palaces as soon as possible. We never considered that the real danger would be the Cranks themselves."

"We didn't hear about what had happened at the Palace right away." Mrs Davenport added, frowning herself. "Our house was on the other side of town and the government tried to keep it as quiet as they could - not expecting the numbers, obviously - and just upped the numbers of armed police in the area. And because we were on the other side of the city and it was the school holidays, we didn't actually hear about the riots and the Crank clashes on the outskirts for more than a month."

My face must have betrayed my surprise. That would make it more than two weeks after the last time we'd seen N that the Davenports had even realised there was a problem in Denver. Mr Davenport was quick to try and fill the gap.

"I know how strange that must sound, but it had all become so neighbourhood orientated in Denver recently, you stuck to your area, the people you knew, and a lot of the time you stayed inside to avoid the Flare. People were selfish by then - rarely considered what was going on behind their own backyard, their own family. But in the next month or so, attacks started to happen in our area - odd Cranks wandering into the neighbourhood, stealing animals or jumping people, breaking windows - and, at first, the police kept it under control. They captured people within a matter of hours, put more barricades up around the area and increased patrols. Some of our friends left then, seeing it for what it was - a powder keg that was going to go off, and sooner rather than later - but we had nowhere to go. Lara and I have lived in Denver our whole lives, we didn't travel much before the Sun Flares, we don't have family elsewhere. We were hoping - and the government, the council were telling us - that soon the whole thing would blow over, that the city would be under control again."

Mr Davenport leaned back in his chair, his eyes focused on something above my head.

"Obviously, we were wrong. In the next few weeks, everything that was left seemed to fall apart instead. The numbers of Immune police officers were dropping, and the vulnerable ones wouldn't go into the areas that were crumbling, and gradually, the mobs of Cranks pushed them back through the city, and it became a skeleton. People were leaving left and right, the police forces were getting smaller and the crimes were getting worse and worse. We knew we had to leave, but still we delayed it, hoping that a cure would be found and more forces could be brought into Denver -we didn't want to leave everything we had built there. Of course, though they had found the Cure by that point (which we didn't know about until about a week ago) they didn't send it into Denver - it was too dangerous. Those that needed it and were sane enough to do something about it escaped the city and got to clinics outside the walls. Meanwhile, the Cranks eventually broke into our neighbourhood and overran it, destroying almost everything they could find. There were tens if not hundreds that were miles past the Gone."

"And N?" I asked, the image of the Gone forcing me to ask the question. "Newt? Was he with them?"

Mr Davenport sighed and shook his head. "That's just the thing. By the time we decided we had to escape, it was too late. We ended up trapped in our house, huddled in one of the centre rooms, the blinds closed, out of sight of as many of the windows as possible. We'd packed our bags with as much food and clothes, possessions as we could and we had the maps spread out on the table. Lara and I had guns, knives - and we were about to try and fight our way out to the walls. We didn't have another plan, and I don't know that that could have ever been successful. A mob hadn't gone past for some time, we were about to leave-"

"We had our coats on and everything!" Savannah broke in, her green eyes wide and serious, as her father carried on.

"We were about to leave when somebody hammered on our front door. As you can imagine, we were terrified. There was almost nobody left in the area that wasn't ill, so our chances weren't good. Firing a gun would have brought all the Cranks in the area down on us and I didn't think I was good enough with a knife to fight anybody off. I'm an accountant, you see-"

Mr Davenport laughed quietly. "So we ignored it at first. We sat completely still and hoped they would go away. But then the hammering happened again and this time he shouted as well. He shouted: 'Help! I know you're in there. I can see your lights. I can see you. Help!' and we still didn't answer, but he called again: 'Help me! Please help me! Oh god, oh god' and he just kept saying it. Over and over."

Mrs Davenport's head was bowed towards the table, her expression pained. "It was awful," She murmured. "He just kept going. You could tell it was somebody young. And there was so much pain in his voice. You could tell he was sick. His voice kept catching and the way he was repeating words wasn't right, and we had no idea how dangerous this boy was. But I couldn't keep listening to it - I have children, I had nephews, nieces - and this atrocity hasn't quite frozen my heart yet. I took the rifle and went to the door. I didn't open it but I answered him, saying: 'who are you? What do you want?' He called back immediately saying 'help me, please. I just want help. I'm alright right now, I'm alright, but I just want help.' And then George came over-"

She looked across at her husband to pick up the story, and he did, sighing and leaning forward. "We'd heard so many horror stories about what Cranks had done to families, to people in areas like that. It seemed so inhuman to keep a door locked against someone begging us for help. But you can understand why we did, at first. But he didn't sound like the ones we'd heard at night - the ones that just screamed and sang and muttered. He was repeating things, but he sounded like he knew exactly what he was saying. So I tried to talk to him. I said 'how do we know you're not going to hurt us? How do we know you won't just attack us and take what you need if we open this door?"

I felt myself stiffen in response to those words. If Newt had been at all himself then, as it sounded like he was, then that would have hurt him so much. N, who did everything for other people. "And what did he say?" I asked.

"Nothing, at first," Mr Davenport replied. "He just made this moaning sound - pain, again - and we heard him move around, saw a flicker through the blinds next to the door. He could see through them, I think, the gaps were wide and the girls were in the hallway. So we just heard a gasp and he called back through the door right away, 'No! No, I would never do that - you have children, I would - no, no, no. Don't ya' see, don't ya' see, that's what I'm trying to buggin' avoid- that's why I need your help. Oh please, I'm not going to hurt ya'. I don't have the bloody strength, even if I wanted to, Mister. Please.' And it was so awful, there was so much horror in his voice, so much pain, so much disgust at even the idea of that that we couldn't keep the door closed any longer. I just took the rifle from Lara and waved the girls back behind the table and then I opened the door."

Mrs Davenport picked up a teaspoon, distractedly, and stirred circles in her coffee and said: "I'm sorry, honey, but he looked awful. It broke my heart. God, there were cuts and bandages all over him, he was so thin - so much thinner than a lot of the others we'd seen - and he was shaking as he stood on the doormat. How old is he?"

My throat was dry and I had to take a gulp of my hot chocolate before I answered. "Nineteen. He'll be twenty next month."

"My god." Mrs Davenport had one hand to her lips, looking ill for a second. "My god. That poor boy. That poor poor boy."

In a strange way, I almost felt glad that this was their reaction - that they felt the injustice of it, that they hurt for him - because surely that meant that he hadn't hurt them, that he hadn't done anything he'd regret, that it really was a version of Newt they'd met, not some animated version of the Flare.

"He was walking funny," Savannah added. "And he had a big bandage on his shoulder. He was all dirty and his clothes were all ripped up."

"Which you told him at the time," Mrs Davenport said, a small smile gracing her face. "And the thing was, even though he was so clearly sick - he had trouble getting his words out, he kept rubbing his forehead and there was a tic in his wrist that kept snapping his hand from side to side - what he said to the girls then was so normal, so kind. It was strange."

"You'd be surprised," I cut in, feeling that I needed to say something on this point. "I'm a Flare supervisor now - I work with Cranks for hours and hours a day, trying to - to reduce their Flare percentage and the scarring. The media portrays them as savage lunatics, but - unless they've passed the Gone - they aren't. If the person was cruel to begin with, that's different, but most Cranks are only violent before the Gone to get things they need, like food, or to protect themselves. And if you think about it, most people Cranks run into are aggressive out of fear, so they're violent back. And N - Newt - is one of the kindest people I've ever met. If he has any control of himself, then I think he'd always be like that. What did he say?"

People were having to readjust the way they thought about Flare victims now, and in my opinion, it can't happen fast enough. Mr Davenport was nodding as I spoke, clearly thinking about it. "He saw them, and when Savannah told him how dirty he was, he - he actually laughed. Isla was hiding behind the table, and that - I think that upset him, though he seemed to understand. He held his hands up to them and said something like: 'It's okay. I know I look bad - I don't make a habit of it, ya' know? - but I ain't gonna hurt you-'

"Why did he speak like that?" Savannah asked suddenly. "With those funny words?"

"He's from London, in England - and his accent's pretty strong. They use those words there." I told her, which seemed to satisfy her and she nodded shortly and decided to fill me in on the rest, saying:

"He said he wasn't going to hurt us, and he smiled and said it was okay again, so I told him okay and came forward a bit. I told him my name was Savannah and he told me that was a pretty name and his name was Newt. I told him that that was a weird name and he told me he knew it was, but he didn't mind it."

"What happened then?" I asked. Mr Davenport smiled at his daughter, but made a gesture to show he was carrying on from there.

"He'd been very focused on wanting help for something and he was trembling when he came into the hall - I don't know if that was the pressure of keeping control or from how weak he was - and he started to tell us, but then he caught sight of our maps spread out on the table and the bags by the door. He completely forgot about needing help himself and said, 'you're trying to escape?' We told him yes, and he immediately walked over and looked at the route we'd sketched on the map. Straight away, Newt said 'that won't work'. We were already frightened enough by this point and I asked him why. He just mumbled 'pen, pen, pen' under his breath until he found one and then circled all these areas on the map we'd got - most of which our planned route touched or came very close to.

When we asked him what they were, he said those were the mob bases - the camps of the biggest and most dangerous groups of Cranks in the city. No way would we get past them alive - the ones hunting in those packs were more Gone than most and had almost monopolised the lethal weaponry."

As he spoke, I couldn't help picturing the last time I'd seen N, at the head of one of those snarling hunting packs. From what the Davenports said, he seemed to have been alone that day - why had he left? Somehow, I was glad that he had. Mob mentality, of any kind, was dangerous.

"So, naturally, that horrified us. We couldn't leave knowing that - even if he had been lying, I wasn't willing to risk it - but we didn't know where else to go. All the trains, Bergs, buses, flights out of Denver had stopped - if we couldn't get to the underground tunnels then we couldn't get out. It was a black moment - a feeling of real inevitability about it. This feeling that you've failed as a parent. The feeling that you can't save anybody from what's going to happen. That even if a Cure could get into Denver, it wouldn't be fast enough to save you."

Isla - the quieter girl in the yellow coat - slipped her arm through her father's and leant her head on his shoulder with a shudder as I said, "But you did escape."

Mr Davenport nodded vigorously, leaning forward. "Yes. And that's one of the reasons we so desperately wanted to contact you. I was sinking into some plain of despair as that point, I couldn't see an option that wouldn't end with all or part of my family dead. And I couldn't take that. After a while, Newt said - very quietly at first - 'I'd do bloody anything to get out of here' which was very much in line with my own thoughts at the time, but then he added, 'back when I still could, I made sure I knew how to do it.' For that second, it looked like everything he was feeling was on his face. Like he was about to cry. He said 'Not much use to me anymore. Somehow I missed it.' God, poor kid. But - but then he straightened up - doing that strange muscle spasm with his neck, that always looks painful - and he beckoned Lara and I over to the maps and said 'But you haven't. Let me tell you."

My chest tightened, imagining what must have been going on in what was left of N's mind as Mrs Davenport told the next part of the story.

"And he did. He told us that the only safe way was over the roofs. We'd have to take ropes and be prepared to jump where we could, but the houses in our area are so close together that you can do it in most places. He sketched out another map for us while we asked why that was any better than being on the ground. He said that one of the early things you lose as a Crank is co-ordination, and you need a hell of a lot of co-ordination to even get onto the roofs, forget over them. Cranks can't climb over the roofs, so they won't catch you up there - there'll be the odd one or two, but they won't be the really dangerous kind, that all we'd have to watch out for was being shot at, that we should keep out of sight where we could. I asked him how he was sure about that. He said 'I've seen 'em all try it', but then he just looked at me and finished. "And because I can't. And I used to be really good at it."

I was fifteen, back in a hospital ward, with N and his strapped ankle. That was the way he used to escape the street gangs in London. My eyes started to burn, but I blinked, not wanting to make these kids watch any more trauma than they already had. Mrs Davenport was squeezing her husband's fingers, her knuckles white as she remembered it, her brow furrowed and she carried on:

"God, my heart just went out to him. I'd never seen a Crank like that, but then I suppose we've never talked to one for long enough to find out how human they are. He sketched out a whole plan for us, told us where the escape tunnels would be from the edge of the walls and to follow them until we reached a major city, somewhere East. And we followed it. It was his plan that got us out of Denver. That got us here, in the end - got all of us here. So, now we owe that boy more than you can imagine. But we knew at the time that we'd owe him, even if it didn't all go exactly to plan, so we asked what we could do for him.

He looked embarrassed at first - no, it was more than embarrassed. I think he was probably ashamed, poor kid. He asked us if we had any food left - anything that we couldn't take with us, and we said, of course, and we gave him everything we had left: cans we couldn't carry, cereal boxes and fruit."

"Thank you." I whispered, and Mrs Davenport smiled sadly at me.

"You're welcome, honey. It wasn't enough. But I asked him why - why that was all he wanted." She paused for a second and rubbed the bridge of her nose, glancing at her daughters, as if she didn't know where to start with the sentence. "He said that the shopping centres were raided at the start. There was nothing left in them, nothing that you could use, anyway. But people had to eat. He said when - when you go under - that was the way he described it - it's like your brain goes onto autopilot. Like you were saying, Lily, necessities, and food was one of them. He said that he can't really remember what happens in those moments, they were getting more and more frequent, but he's seen what happens to the other people, the ones who don't eat, when they go under. They do-"

Mrs Davenport faltered for a second. "-whatever they have to do, to get the nutrients...eat whatever they have to."

She didn't have to tell me any more. I'd seen it, when we'd tried to escape the city ourselves. Cats and various pets going missing had been nothing new, even when I lived in Austin. I was guessing that cats weren't all that were on the agenda now. Mr Davenport took over from his wife, and I saw her fingers shaking as she picked up her coffee again.

"He said he never...'hunted' when he was awake. But he wasn't sure what happened when - when he wasn't. And he didn't want anything to happen - in fact, he'd rather die himself than for anything to happen. But he wasn't in control of that anymore."

Oh, N. Hearing those words was one of the strangest moments of my life. On one hand, every words they said cut into me like broken glass - it was everything he had been so afraid of. Hurting people without even death to stop it. That made me want to scream, and fly back to Denver myself, murderous mobs be damned, but at the same time, I was glad. Because what they were telling me was him. It was the boy I knew, not the one I'd met in Denver's dimly-lit side street. And if it was him, then he wasn't Gone. Not yet.

"So...so we gave him everything we had left. Lara noticed his shoulder - she was a nurse back home - he had some kind of bullet wound. It looked like the bullet had been gouged out with something sharp, but it wasn't very well done."

Mrs Davenport shook her head, looking frustrated. "No. It wasn't - but there wasn't much I could do there. I gave him some anti-inflammatory stuff and a couple of those knitting-type bandages. But still-" She waved her hands around in the air, searching. "-that didn't feel like enough. You know, he knelt down and spoke to the girls before we left? Didn't he, Vannah?"

Savannah nodded energetically, practically bouncing forward to tell me. "Yeah! He sat on the floor, even though Isla wouldn't come that close. He held my hand - because I was a bit scared, only a teensy bit - and he told us it would be okay. And that we'd have to be really brave and stick together on the roof and in all the tunnels and that Mommy and Daddy would need us to be super strong and scary. Because, 'as long as you're together, I promise ya' you'll make it'. That was what he said."

She smiled proudly, and my heart squeezed tight in my chest. 'I'm here', I'd promised him, so many times. But we'd left him there. We left him again. What if he'd changed his mind? Mrs Davenport sighed too and told me:

"Yeah, it was. I couldn't help looking at him and thinking: this is somebody's son. Somebody's baby. And he's helping my babies. I asked him if there was anything - anything - else we could do to help him. He said 'No - and that's okay, ya' know?' but then he knelt down and showed me the back of his neck. He had a tattoo there - lettering. Something about being the 'Property of WICKED'?"

I nodded. "We were Trial subjects for WICKED. They branded us before the Scorch Trial."

Mr Davenport frowned and said: "I thought WICKED put Immunes through those Trials, to see why the Flare didn't damage the brain. Newt can't have been Immune?"

I sighed, "No. WICKED exposed some non-Immunes to the Flare too to compare their symptoms to ours. N was one of them."

Mrs Davenport visibly blanched and her husband looked sick and furious in equal parts as he shook his head. What WICKED had done was common knowledge by now - we'd made sure of it. We'd given police statements, backed up by Timmy, Julie & co. and it had been broadcast on international news. There were still police searches going on for those involved, but most of those responsible for the crimes were either dead themselves or had gone so deep into hiding that they were virtually untraceable.

"My God." He said again. "My God...monsters. Anyway, he showed us that tattoo and then asked us - if we ever made it to a major city, with NetBlock and the like - to find a girl named Lily and a boy named Minho with the same tattoos. And to tell them that he loved them. And that he was sorry. That he was really sorry."

You've got nothing to be sorry for. I couldn't quite get the next breath in around the lump in my throat, and Mrs Davenport reached across the table and took my hand gently as a single tear escaped and rolled down my face, marking my napkin with a dark stain. Stop it, now, Lily. I thought, Crying won't help him. Luckily, Savannah chose that moment to catapult herself over onto my sofa and say:

"Do you have the tattoo? So we know you're the right Lily?"

I shifted towards her, glad for the distraction, and lifted my hair off the back of my neck to show her the thick black lettering. She hummed quietly as she ran one small finger over words. "Okay. Who's Minho? Where's he?

"He's my friend - he's Newt's best friend. They're like brothers, but he has work today."

"Will you tell him Newt said to tell him he's sorry and he loves him?"

"I'll tell him straight away."

Savannah fell silent for a second and sat back on her heels - and it really was only a a second - before she perked up again and asked:

"Are you Newt's girlfriend?"

"Vannah!" Mr Davenport frowned and tried to beckon her over onto their side of the table, but I stretched my hands out and shook my head.

"No, no - it's okay, I don't mind." I looked across to the little girl, who was looking back at me intently. "Yes, I was once."

"And do you love him?" Her expression was more than a little judgemental as she waited for my answer.

"Very much."

Savannah seemed to consider that answer and then she took my hand that was still resting in my lap in both of hers and patted it sweetly, not saying anything at all. To my surprise it was Isla who spoke next. Isla looked to be a couple of years older than Savannah, maybe eleven or twelve. She had sat snuggled against her father, her auburn hair covering most of her face, only allowing me to see the edge of a frown around it, but now she brushed it back and looked at me openly.

"He was nice." She said. "But can you tell us something normal about him? Something about him when he wasn't even sick at all?"

I liked that. I liked that she wanted to see past the Flare and try to see him. I nodded, leaning forward a little.

"Alright," I answered, thinking about it. "Alright. He'd like to learn the okarina one day -it's an instrument that looks a bit like a bean - because he thought it would be funny. He loves fireworks, because his Mum used to watch them with him when he was little. And he's really scared of spiders - I used to catch them on our Berg."

Savannah made a shrieking sound and shuddered. "Me too, me too! Spiders are gross."

I laughed and Isla smiled slightly, content with the answer, and I asked: "Would you like to see a picture of him? Normally?"

Both girls nodded vigorously, and Savannah scuttled back over to sit on her mother's lap so she could see the tablet I'd slipped out of my bag.

"There you go," The photo on the screen was from Newt's fifteenth birthday. He was sitting on a pile of tissue paper next to the misshapen piñata with Winston's Birthday Hat askew on his head while he laughed at something off camera. "That was his birthday, quite a while ago. Oh, that one was a few months ago."

It was a picture of Newt sitting on one of the sofas in the WICKED Common Room, a battered guitar they'd given us in his lap. Charlie was perched on one side of him, testing positions on the fretboard, and Newt's head was tilted towards her as he told her where to go next. I was sitting on the other side, leaning against his shoulder, happy to watch them. "Minho took that photo."

"What's that one?" Savannah asked, looking at the clip next to it, somewhere in a WICKED gym.

"That one's a video," I replied. "Newt loved dancing, before we ended up with WICKED. His mother was a dancer. That was him doing an aerial routine with some ballet pieces. Here, I'll show you."

The video was a challenge, another Trial where Thomas and Teresa were standing on the sidelines with their clipboards, but you can tell that Newt wasn't thinking about that. He wasn't thinking about anything other than the music from an old musical - Billy Elliot, I think? - that was blaring from the speakers at either end of the room, spinning and spinning on one foot, swinging himself up onto the hoops that hung from the ceiling, anchoring himself on the ropes with one limb at a time, but making it seem weightless, effortless. He'd got so many bruises and strains learning that routine, hours stretching in the Common Room, determined that he'd get it right, that he'd do it again and again until he could reach the hoops with one arm, until he could spin without falling, jump without using two feet. And it was beautiful.

Mrs Davenport was stroking Savannah's hair with glimmering eyes as she whispered: "He doesn't look much older than you there, Isla."

When I glanced up, I realised with surprise that there were tears in Isla's blue eyes as she watched fifteen-year-old Newt spin across the screen.

"I hope you find him." Isla whispered, looking up and meeting my gaze with a trembling smile.

"Thank you for helping me." I took her hand from the table and squeezed it, returning her smile. I cleared my throat suddenly, glancing at the clock. "Gosh, I'd better call our Tracker. Thank you so much for your help - I - I can't tell you how much it means to us, what he means. I really hope he'll be able to thank you himself one day. Please, let me know if I can help you find somewhere to stay, or with schools or anything at all."

Mrs Davenport got to her feet and hugged me suddenly. I was so surprised that it took me a couple of seconds to hug her back, but when I did, I held on for a long few moments before stepping away. "Thank you," I said again.

"You're welcome, honey. Please, let us know if you hear anything."

"I will - I promise I'll keep you updated, Mr and Mrs Davenport. Bye, Savannah! Isla!" Savannah gave me a cheery wave, her spirit barely scratched by the experiences she'd had in her short life thus far, and Isla gave me a small smile as I left the right number of bills on Mrs T's counter, gave Brontë a quick scratch behind the ears and opened the door.

I hadn't even hit the sidewalk before I called Roger.

Two Weeks Later

We'd made a lot of invaluable friends through 'Looking for Newt' and all of our work in New York - Mrs T, the Davenports, Grace from Rehab - and Roger Dawson was one of them. When we first arrived, we did a lot of talks everywhere we could get in - town halls, restaurants, parks - telling people about what had happened to us at WICKED, telling people about Newt, appealing for help, for donations, for whatever we could get. One day a couple of months ago, we'd given a talk at a pretty crowded park charity concert, funded by the council and afterwards, one of the tech guys came backstage with Roger and his wife, Anna, who were asking to see 'the WICKED kids'.

Roger told us that, before the Sun Flares, he had worked for the FBI - a top police tracker for twenty years. He wanted to offer us his services - at no charge, however much we tried to push a fee onto him. Then he and his wife told us why. They had a son - Joseph - and when Roger pulled his phone out to show us a photograph and a short video, I understood even before he explained why they were there. The photo was a few years old, which would make Joseph a bit older than us now, but he was tall - slightly gangly - with thick blond hair that flopped over his forehead, light brown eyes and a wide smile as he laughed at whoever was holding the camera and hugged a tiny chocolate Lab to his chest. In the video, you could hear Joseph laughing too, running circles around the little dog and throwing himself into backflips while the dog went crazy around his feet. His bone structure was nothing like N's - his face was more delicate, his features slightly sharper - but Joseph's colouring, his energy was the same.

"He'd have been twenty-two this Christmas." Roger had said.

Joseph had caught the Flare a year ago while on a training course in Boston. Roger and Anna weren't Immune and Joseph had never come home. He'd written a letter to his parents then shot himself in the head on an expedition to a nearby forest before he could infect anyone else. Roger couldn't save his son, but he was 'damn well going to help that boy.'

And he'd tried. Roger led expeditions in all of the major cities around us and he'd spent most of his time in Denver. He'd found people of all ages in all kinds of places, but he'd never found a trace of N. Not until that night, anyway.

Like I've already told you, the phone rang at 2AM, December 15th 2071.

I'd been in bed for all of two hours, because I'd broken my wrist at the end of my shift. Or rather, I'd had my wrist broken at the end of my shift. One of the boys I looked after - Eli, a sixteen-year-old from Queens, who (when he was himself) was gentle, intelligent and liked Star Wars movies - had been provoked into a fight by one of the other boys in the Common Room. That was a problem, because - in recovering Cranks - the moods of the people around you will leach into yours, particularly negative feelings like aggression. I had to run in and try to pull them apart, before the one-on-one fight turned into a full-on brawl with everyone in the Common Room pitching in, but Eli had caught me by the shoulder instinctively and thrown me across the room into a bookcase, where I landed strangely and felt a sick snapping in my arm. He'd reacted to the noise, whirling around, and that was enough to snap him out of it and he started to cry, apologising so much and so quickly that the words all merged into each other. So, I had to take him back to his room, strapping my arm as still as I could until his wounds had been patched up and I'd convinced him that I understood, that it wasn't his fault, not really. Then I'd called Karly and she'd driven me to the General Hospital where they'd strapped it for real, but the wait was so long that it was eleven when we got home and midnight when I fell asleep. And two hours later the phone rang.

"Hello?"

"We've got him. East Denver. But it ain't good."

I can't describe the way that moment felt. The words I'd been waiting for almost six months - the words I'd dreamed about so many times only to wake up with it torn away. The elation, the storm of hope that ripped through me took my breath away, but the terror that he might be Gone pulled every muscle in my body tight. That there might be nothing left to save. For a long second I couldn't speak at all, but then it all came out at once.

"Newt?" I gasped. "How is he? Is- is he alive? Is he hurt? Where was he? What happened? Roger?"

Roger understood and, as always, didn't waste any words. "He's alive. He's pretty banged up, kiddo, we can't tell how much 'til we get him to the Centre. He was only a few miles off your postcode - some backstreet between rows of tumbledown businesses. As for what happened, we weren't expecting it. It was pretty damn strange. We were chasing the Thompson case near the supermarket - that turned out cold - but it took a while, so it was dark by the time we gave up round there. On the way back, place was pretty still. Odd Crank, odd cats and all the usual moaning at night - we were going pretty damn quick 'cause it's cold out there and we'd left all our real weapons in the truck, with it being the Thompson case. But there was some clattering coming from one of the alleyways, and I remembered where we were. I decided it was worth a glance, though it was prob'ly nothing or nobody on our books. There was somebody asleep at the alley entrance, but I knew it wasn't them. My other guy was all for turning back then, but I had a feeling about it, went a bit further in. There was a shape slumped against one of the walls - he had his knees up to his chest and his head against them. He doesn't look much like that photo no more, kid, but I couldn't've known who it was in that light if it wasn't for that bracelet he had."

He still had that?

"The one with your name on it? So, I called him. Used his name. He looked right at me, right away. I knew it was him. But I knew damn well it wasn't him too. Kid looked sick as a dog, and he wasn't too pleased to see us. I'll be honest, Lily, I thought he was lost the first second I saw him-"

No, no, no.

"He started snarling at us, on his feet in a hot second. And I thought we were done, kiddo. He's got to be at least 6'4, ain't he? However thin he is, he's still looks pretty strong. He came at us, shouting something - I don't know what - and I didn't know what to do. My tranquilliser was in my pack, by the time I'd pulled it out, he'd have been on us. And so - don't ask me why - I started shouting your names at him, like Lily, Minho, Thomas, Lily, they sent us, kid, thinking there was no use in it, but all our guns were in the truck. But this is the strange thing - and I ain't never seen a Crank do anything like this before, and I've seen a lot of 'em - as he was moving towards us then, stumbling, he seemed to almost slam his one foot into the other ankle, the one that's weak. It was like half of him was working against the other half. Damned strange. He just crashed, fell like a load of bricks on the concrete."

"Then what happened?"

"See, that's almost as strange. After he fell, he looked up from that dusty alleyway and he looked right at me. And it was like the kid had a different face. I was so certain he was Gone when we got there. That kid that was screaming didn't have anything human about him - he was spitting and raging, and if he'd got to us like that, he'd have ripped our damn eyeballs out. But when he looked up-" Roger's voice caught for a second and he coughed roughly. I wondered if he was imagining Joseph. "-he really was just a kid. Like there was no anger left in him, ya' know? Just despair. Just like he was tired. He only said one thing - he rubbed that bracelet and he said 'Please help me. Oh, please.' And then he slammed his head into the brick of the wall, once twice, three times like he was trying to knock his brains out - by then Kieran had the tranquiliser out and shot him twice. That was how we got him to the truck."

I was crying and I didn't know when I'd started. It was another story that was so incredibly horrible but so horrifically Newt at the same time. Running my fingers over the lizard pendant, I shifted my grip on the phone. "Right. Right. Where are you now?"

"In a rescue Berg. We're most of the way back to NY, kiddo - twenty minutes maybe? I'd have called you sooner, but my priority was your guy. Gotta get as many drugs into his system as fast as we can. Gotta give him the best chance from here."

I was already pulling clothes on from around the room with my good hand, balancing my phone between my cheek and my shoulder but my hands were shaking so much I could barely tie up the laces on my shoes.

"If you were going to guess his Flare percentage, where would you put it?" I asked as I stumbled out into the living room in the dark, forcing as much of my brain into work mode as possible, dimly registering how strange it was to be talking about my N like he was a patient from work.

Roger was quiet for a couple of seconds. "Honestly?" He replied, his voice lower than I would have liked. "If he hadn't done that thing at the end, I'd have told you somewhere in the high nineties. Now...I don't know. He's still unconscious and I'm not sure they'll bring him straight round in the city...80s probably. I'm sorry, Lily. It could be less, it could be, but-"

"Don't say it - please," I said. "If it is lower, then that'd be amazing. If it's not, then I don't want to get my hopes up - get their hopes up, you know?"

"I know. I know. I'm going to let you go so you can get here, but I'll meet you at the General Hospital, kid, okay?"

"Okay," I was sitting in front of the bay windows from our sofa, looking out at the glittering lights of New York. "Thank you, Roger. Thank you so much."

"You're welcome, kid. I'm glad it was me." And then the phone clicked dead on the other end of the line.

5AM - New York General Hospital

Like I said before, hospitals are strange places at night.

We'd been waiting for at least two hours in this white panelled corridor, waiting for news, waiting for the nurses to tell us we could see him. Minho was pacing, furious, back and forth across the linoleum floor, squeaking as he went. Gally was slumped in one of the plastic waiting room chairs, texting someone - probably Clint, who was on a medical training course in the Bronx. Thomas was sitting on the floor, leaning against the wall with his eyes closed, and Karly was perched on a nearby table, her fingers locked in mine. We'd fallen into silence by then as the seconds crawled by, because what was there to say? Either he'd respond to the drugs or not. But none of us could think about anything else.

As soon as I'd put the phone down to Roger, I'd flown around the apartment, hammering on doors until everyone was standing in the corridor - minus Clint, who was away, Olly and Brenda who were on shifts at the Rehab Centre and Charlie, who was at a friend's - explained what was going on until everybody was wide awake and in the car. Karly had driven here, which had already put everyone on edge, so when the bolted door that we'd all been staring at swung open, hitting the wall with a bang, it's fair to say everybody jumped about a foot in the air, flung from whatever memories or nightmares our dreams were spinning, our attention back in the room. We'd only seen two nurses before that point, but now a troop of doctors was flooding into the corridor from the emergency rooms behind the door, all of them talking amongst themselves, flicking through pages of notes, walking as if our gaggle of exhausted, hopeful Gladers scattered around the corridor were invisible. There were faces on the sheets in their hands, descriptions - height, weight, percentage, age, temperament - that the specialists were pointing at, muttering about.

Karly leaned across and whispered in my ear: "What are they doing?"

"They're choosing patients," I murmured back. I knew what they were doing because I'd done it so many times myself. Because mental health work is so personal, Flare supervisor were led through the rooms of newly discovered patients themselves to select people to cover. I hated that, in a lot of ways, having to choose somebody to help over somebody else who was sick. I hated the idea that other people were considering N like that. "Deciding who they want to put on their rota for help."

As they walked past us, I saw one woman - older with curly, black hair - whisper something to her colleague, but all I caught was 'boy from Denver' and a sympathetic glance. Something dropped inside me. What does that mean? Minho shot me a worried glance - he'd obviously heard it too.

Three male supervisors were walking together at the back, all younger-looking. The tallest one muttered to the man next to him.

"God, that third one though."

"I know," The first other man replied, a smirk on his face. "She was crazy as a raccoon, but she must have been hot a few months ago. I'll probably take that singing one, but I hope somebody sorts her out."

What? I already felt sick, but that made a surge of sudden anger wash through me. Bastards. That was one of the major problems of trying to reverse such a huge epidemic so quickly - the Centres needed people so badly that they rarely had time to check that the people who were qualified were actually decent human beings. Somewhere through the fog of stress and anger, I made sure I caught their name tags, West and Gunner - I'd write to the hospital later - and took a step forward to call them back when the third man suddenly snapped.

"Hey! Didn't we leave that stuff behind in the 2010s? Cut it out, you're professional adults. You're supposed to be helping them, not objectifying them - they've got enough problems without that." Thank you. This man - slightly shorter with dark brown hair, cut short - flipped though the leaflet of faces and pointed to one. "I'm worried about this one - you heard what the Doc was saying right? We've got no idea about internal damage, but-"

Who was that? I remembered all the hours spent poring over the faces of infected people, people who had families and having to decide whether we could help them, or whether it was impossible. Whether we would even try. I remembered sitting in front of families, telling them that their children were beyond what we could help, beyond hope, and the desire not to be on the other side of that table burned inside me. Newt had responded. He had responded to something rooted in memory - surely that was impossible if he was Gone?

"Wait!" I called to what was left of the group. "Do you know anything about the boy from Denver? Newt?"

The tall man didn't even turn around as he flipped through the pages, still walking away. "There's nothing to know in that one, honey. He's nothing but a shell - straight case."

"But he can't be!" I argued, walking after them. "They haven't even tested him yet, you don't know-"

The horrid man looked over his shoulder at me, glanced down to my ID badge still on my shirt and replied: "Look, if you're a Flare Super yourself, you should know we don't always need the numbers. Even if he's not quite Gone, who wants to take on somebody totally rabid, just to have the big shots abandon it anyway?"

"Yeah," The second man had a kinder expression on his face, but there wasn't any more room for challenge. "I'm sorry - it's just one of those, isn't it?"

No, no, it's not. I couldn't just take that. We hadn't gone through five years of Trials together, we hadn't been dragged through the bowels of Denver, hadn't flown to Peru, slaved over blood tests and scans and diagrams, flown back to New York, slept four hours a night, run search missions for nearly four months just to have some slimy bastards in white coats tell us it was impossible. They'd nearly reached the door, but I ran after them.

"No, you're wrong! Please. Please, just give him a chance. Just a chance - we're not asking for anything more than that! You don't understand - please." My voice was catching, scratching against my throat. The two men didn't even flinch, just closed their folders and kept walking. But the third man - the smaller one, with the dark brown hair - stopped and turned around. I don't know what I looked like. I'd slept for two hours, I'd braided my hair twelve hours ago, one of my arms was in a plaster cast and strapped against my chest and there was no trace of the tears that had been in my eyes before, only pure anger simmering in them. But I was going to get that chance.

With my good hand, I fumbled my phone out of my pocket and showed the man my lock screen - N sitting next to Minho on the same balcony rail, a guitar in one hand, smiling at the camera.

"Whoever you've seen in there, Mr-" I pointed to the door and looked at his identity tag. "-Oxford, this is who he really is."

I opened my Camera app and scrolled through photo after photo of Newt at WICKED - with me, with Minho, with Charlie, laughing, dancing, playing soccer badly, with Alby, with all of us, fifteen, sixteen, nineteen. I had seconds to show him the human inside the shell. Mr Oxford stood still, watching intently as each photo and video flickered across the screen, an expression I couldn't read spreading over his face. The last video was of Newt picking up Charlie, spinning her around the Common Room at WICKED, laughing while she shrieked and giggled and spun - he was so in control, even with his bad leg, every movement was exact, balanced, so different from the snarling, violent Cranks we'd seen before. Eventually, the man looked up, taking in the five of us in the otherwise empty corridor, then glanced back at my phone.

"You guys were from WICKED," He muttered, rubbing his forehead with his fingertips as if he could erase the frown that was forming there. Now I was sure his expression was guilt - anger, apology. "God, I'm sorry. I used to pay a donation fee to those apes. Thought they were doing something good, rather than just murdering kids."

"But he isn't dead yet," Gally called from the door, fixing Oxford with a hard stare. "That's on you guys."

Oxford nodded slowly, running his fingers through his hair. He was older than I'd realised at first - the creases around his eyes and lips, the slight curve of his shoulders, the tip of a widow's peak creeping back from his forehead. I didn't realise he was studying me in the same way until he suddenly said:

"I know you." I met his eyes with surprise. I was certain I'd never see him before in my life and started to shake my head, but he was already leaning forward, carrying on.

"Aren't you a supervisor in C Block? Didn't you have a patient called Martin lately?"

I had. Martin was nine. Like a lot of kids, he'd caught the Flare at school, but his parents had refused to hand him over to any authorities until they got to a Rehab Centre. He was small and cheeky with sandy brown hair and all the energy of a Duracell bunny - which had been good, by the time we'd got him running around and laughing, down to the Green and Silver levels at 20, 10%, but while he was still flying at supervisors, throwing himself at things, not so much.

"Yes," I replied, slightly mystified by the change of topic. "Yes, I did. Why?"

The hint of a smile started tugging at Oxford's lips. "He's my nephew. I heard he gave you some trouble."

I laughed, in spite of myself, as images of shredded pillows and books, pouting sessions and peacemaking storytime flitted across my mind's eye. I turned over my free hand to show Oxford the white scar across the back of my wrist, then pointed to a tiny white nick on my collarbone.

"He gave me some war wounds, sure. But he was stronger than his Flare in the end, just like I knew he would be." I looked back at the picture of Newt that I'd left on the screen. "Just like I know he is."

I shot Oxford a pointed glance and he coughed, rubbing his forehead again. "Miss Pasteur, I'm incredibly grateful for everything you did for Martin - we owe you his life - and believe me, I want to help, but the information we've been given on Isaac really isn't conclusive, there's no certainty that this would work."

"Do you need certainty?" Minho appeared at my shoulder, his tone short. "We're almost twenty, and we've never had anything even slightly close to that our whole freaking lives."

"And what's wrong with trying?" Karly added, resting her hand on my shoulder. "Hell, if it's cash, we can pay, we've got money."

Gally came up then, physical proof of what WICKED had done to us, the harsh LED lights of the hospital corridor catching on his scars and casting shadows around them and said quietly, but firmly. "If Newt isn't salvageable, then he isn't, and we'll accept that. But we're not the kind of people that can live with 'what if's, Mr Oxford."

I watched Oxford look at each of us, at Thomas still slumped on the linoleum, his head in his hands. I watched as that same sadness came over Oxford's face as he suddenly sighed, rubbing his eyes with his free hand and stepped towards us.

"Look, guys," He said, his expression frank. "If it was up to me, I'd do it, okay? I saw that bracelet he brought in back there, 's the same as your name tag. I've seen your posters round town for months, I've seen those photos now and I think the things you've done are amazing - way beyond your years and way more than most people do in their whole lives. I'm in awe of you, and of him, to be honest. I've got kids, I've got a wife, I know how you must feel right now. If it was up to me, I'd take Isaac on the spot."

"That's not his name," I said quietly. "I had to write 'Isaac N. Newton' on the forms because they wanted a 'real name', but his name's Newt. Please. He'd give it everything he's got."

Oxford nodded again, and his face was kind, but he made a noise of frustration as he looked back at the doctor's office door.

"We've got a meeting now, but as soon as I get out, I'll look at him. I can't promise anything - I wish I could. If he's over a certain Flare percentage, they won't even let me try, you know that, Miss Pasteur." Oxford grimaced slightly. "Not to mention, this would be my first supervising job, so they don't exactly trust me. But I'll try, I can promise you that."

"Thank you!" I thrust my phone back into my pocket and took his hand. "We understand. Thank you so much, Mr Oxford."

The slight smile was back on Oxford's face, as I knew the smiles of wavering hope were back on ours, as he squeezed my hand tight and told me. "Please - call me Will."

I was about to tell him our own names when the bang of the ward door rumbled down the corridor again, followed by the soft voice of the nurse who'd shown us in.

"Erm, Miss Pasteur? Mr Park? You can see him now."

"It's this one," The nurse - small, with black hair and a name tag that said 'Jenny' - gestured to one of the patient rooms. "I'm sorry it's taken so long - we had to remove that chip in his brain to make sure the drugs could access all of the tissue. I have to warn you though, wherever he was, he's been badly injured. We had to shave his head to get to some of the wounds."

"Right. Thank you." I murmured, my focus already on the foot of the bed.

The room itself was full of machines: heart monitors, oxygen monitors, awareness monitors, drips and laptops. In a strange way, it reminded me of WICKED's observation hall at the end of the Maze - I just hoped this was more of an escape than that had been. If this works, then it will really be the end. What they've done to us will be over.

But then I saw Newt. And all thoughts like that disappeared.

They had shaved his head - it was funny how much that changed his appearance. It made the deep hollows of his cheeks, the dark patches around his eyes, the yellow-white of his skin look so much worse when there was nothing to hide behind. Newt was wearing the thin white hospital pyjamas and there were cuts all over his body - some no more than scratches, others deep and wide with fresh sutures crossing them. There was a jagged cut going from his collarbone to his jaw and I was right about that gash on his forehead, I realised, the one from the Berg cupboard that just clipped his eyebrow. It had scarred. My eyes drifted to his shoulder, a puckered mesh of skin and scar tissue, patches of white and scarlet, raised like a crater. The black Flare scars had spread, linking down to his fingertips and lacing all the way up his arms like a caustic chain mail that didn't quite reach his jaw. The first thing to hit me was relief, so strong that my fingertips dug curves into the visitors' chair by the bed. His chest was rising and falling, the oxygen mask abandoned on the table, unnecessary. On one wrist was an identification tag, 'Isaac 'Newt' Newton' - 19 y/o'. On the other was my Dad's wristband - the wristband that I'd put there more than three years ago. How does he still have that? I wondered again. It was him. It was really him. Amongst the alien scars and bruises that marred his skin, there was the scar he'd got building the Homestead, just visible under his collar. The nick on his left thumb that he'd got in Woodwork classes at WICKED. A puckered white line where Gally had swung a wooden board into his head back in the Maze. It was him. It was Newt.

But as soon as I thought it, a shock of fear ripped through me, jolting the elation out of place. Those scars...none of my patients had scars higher than their upper arms. Some only had them on their hands. If the Flare had spread that far on his skin, what the hell had it done inside his head? He'd recognised our names, but how much of that was instinct? Fighting the Flare took an iron will, and that needed somebody to drive it. Somebody left inside his head. So, is it him? Or is it just his body? I didn't know and it made me shiver. He can't have made it this far for nothing. That's not fair. And for a minute, I let myself feel it, gave my mind up to it - the panic and the relief and the wonder.

"No." Minho's voice came from somewhere behind me, hollow and hoarse. "No. Shuck that. No way, man. No way."

I turned and Minho was visibly shaking, his tawny skin taking on an ashy shade. His eyes were darting around the room - at the machines, at the floor, at the observation glass, everywhere but the boy on the bed - glittering under the harsh lights. Suddenly, without another word, he turned on his heel and ran out of the room, leaving the rest of us standing there staring at the space he'd left.

Karly reached out and squeezed my shoulder, her eyes full of emotion as she told me, softly: "He'll come back. Wait a second."

Her gaze didn't meet mine and I wasn't entirely sure that she wasn't talking Newt rather than me. One more squeeze and then she left too, to coax Minho back into a moment she knew he'd regret missing, an uneasy mirror of a similar moment months before - only this time, there was nobody left to blame.

The face of the nurse didn't even flicker - she'd seen too many families for that. She must have seen every reaction on earth. Instead, she just raised her eyebrows at Thomas and I - the only ones left in the room (Gally had stayed outside, no more than four visitors and once, and 'he probably wouldn't want me there anyway'). Her expression was expectant as she gestured to the seats either side of the bed, as if to say 'go on then' before she turned away to alter the display on a nearby screen.

Almost automatically, Thomas and I took the seats next to Newt, but I barely registered what Tommy was doing. Nervous, for a reason I couldn't identify, my hands were shaking slightly as I leaned my elbows on the edge of the mattress and took Newt's hand in both of mine. On the car journey there, I'd expected to be frightened for him. I'd expected the relief and the hope that I'd seen other families crash their way through, that I'd imagined so many times. But what I hadn't expected when I sat down and took his hand was the realisation that I'd forgotten how much I loved him. I'd never stopped loving him - and loving him so much that I'd rather work than sleep, that there were days when Newt was all I could think about. But there's something so different about desperately loving the memories of someone - the spirit of a person - and being with them, holding them. Every plane of Newt's face, the freckles he still had on his nose, the index finger on his left hand that was slightly longer than his right were as familiar to me as the amber eyes and fawn-coloured skin that I saw in the mirror every day. Every detail that I'd been so frightened I was forgetting, that I would somehow lose was in front of me, and the intensity of the moment, of my love for him, temporarily robbed me of my ability to speak.

I realised as I watched Newt's face - completely motionless, even as he kept breathing - how much I wanted him to open his eyes and laugh, or tell a joke, or even complain like he had when I woke him up once at WICKED: 'Ugh, don't ya' know, Lilbug, newts buggin' hibernate?'

"It's funny," Thomas said suddenly. His hand was resting on Newt's forearm as he leant forward, mirroring me. "After all this shuck time, I don't know what to say. You know - he must have sat like this with me for hours when I got stung in the Maze." Thomas laughed softly, the kind of laugh that was only a breath. "But now it's my turn, and I don't know where to start."

"I'm not sure there is a place to start. We just need to talk to him." I squeezed Newt's hand in mine, shuffled my chair a little closer to the bed. "Hey there, N," I said softly. "It's me, Lily...you're pretty sticking late, you know that? That's not like you - order, remember?"

Thomas smiled slightly at some memory that triggered as I carried on.

"We've been here nearly four months, and there is absolutely no order. There is no plan - you'd hate it. But you'd love it too. We've got an apartment basically in the middle of the parks - well, it's four apartments, actually, but we've put stairs in and knocked some walls through - and you can see all the way across the gardens from them, real gardens too. You'd love the café next to us, Mrs T's, she's lovely and she always asks about you - she's got a dog and he's gorgeous. And there's this lake about a mile from us, with ducks and geese, and you can hire those swan boats at the weekends-"

"And the lights in 5th Avenue!" Thomas broke in. "They've put all the Christmas lights up early now people can get out to see them. You walk through them in the dark and it's all kinda magic."

"Yes, and our apartment has all these huge windows, and you can sit in front of them when it gets dark and watch all the lights come on in New York - just like when we were kids at the WICKED centre, watching the lights in those two cities. But now, we get to be part of it - we're not watching from behind the glass anymore, N, it's all real."

We were both smiling now, all these things we'd stored up in our heads to share with him spilling out in the pristine hospital room over the beeping of the machines. Somewhere outside, I could hear Karly murmuring to Minho - he can't have gone that far. I heard her say, "We knew it wasn't going to be easy, but you can't just-"

Then Minho's harsh whisper, cutting her off. "I know, alright, I know."

"You'll never guess what I found in the market last week, Newt" I said, turning back to the boy on the bed, not sure how long we had. "They had all kinds of weird instruments, didgeridoos and those tiny metal pianos that you play with your thumbs? But under all this sheet music and stuff, they had an okarina! It was only five dollars, so I bought it, even though I wasn't sure when you were going to show up. It's on the bedside table in your room now. We've left you a room in the apartment - it felt strange not to. It's a bit weird at the moment, 'cause Clint's doing his medical training, so it's got some plastic CPR dummies in it right now, but we'll evict them as soon as you kick this thing."

Thomas nodded. "Clint finishes training in a few months anyway - all those splinters in the Glade meant he got to skip a few months. He'll be Dr Williams soon. And Lily - Lily's finished her Psych training, and you should see her, she's a Flare supervisor with loads of kids running her ragged."

"So, same as always, then," I added, with a wry smile, and teased. "Thomas is a big-shot scientist up at the research college, telling people what to do, same as always. Gally's with us, you know - he's just got some kind of apprenticeship with the tech arm of a forensic centre here."

"And you'd be surprised," Thomas broke in, "He's not actually as much of a slinthead as we thought. He even takes out the trash sometimes. Brenda's working at the orphanage and Minho's working as a trainer down at the sports ground, mostly with sports teams but he does rehab classes sometimes. Karly's actually doing a business course, right Lily?"

"Yep. She's a powerhouse. They're together at the moment, but they broke up a few weeks ago-"

"Twice." Thomas smiled, but it was slightly sad. "You'd be laughing at him, Newt - he loves her, but he's never going to say it first."

I could still hear their voices, low, barely perceptible over the whir of everything they'd hooked Newt up to.

"If that was you..." Karly's whisper carried in through the open door. I didn't hear Minho's reply.

Thomas launched into a funny story about Min's interview at the sports ground and I just held Newt's hand, tracing the raised blood vessels with a fingertip. They'll go white, I realised, if he heals - like my Dad's. A spiderweb across his skin.

A cough sounded from the doorway, and we all turned. Minho. His face was set and his lips pressed together but, this time, he made it to the bed without flinching.

"Can he hear us?" Minho asked suddenly, looking at me for an answer.

"It - it depends," I replied. "Some people remember, some don't. But he might be hearing us."

Minho nodded slowly and took another step towards the bed, Karly a few steps behind him. Thomas immediately got to his feet, but Minho ignored the chairs completely and sat on the edge of the bed, looking down at Newt. The nurse shot him a worried glance, but once she'd established that he wasn't disturbing anything, turned back to her notes.

"Well, old pal." Minho's voice was still a little husky as he rested a hand on Newt's shoulder and frowned. "This is a fine shucking mess, man, I'll give you that. You win, shuckface. This is officially the biggest piece-of-klunk mess you've ever got into. Didn't think you could ever top that stunt in the Maze, but here we are."

He leaned a little bit closer. "Now, I don't care what's going on in your head, brother, you're gonna listen to me now. Are you listening all nice 'n' pretty? See, I'll even use your shuck words, if you want." Minho barked a laugh. "I've done this before, okay? I've sat next to you, just like this, a year ago, scared out of my mind while you're conked out and cut up and it's bullshit. I'm sick of this, and I know you've gotta be. So I'm never ever doing this again, you are never going to give us an excuse to do this again. Are we clear? You're gonna kick this disease the hell out of here and come home."

Minho ran a hand through his hair with his free hand. "''Cause we've got a home now, Newt. You're not allowed to skip out on that. That lie you told Alby back in the Maze about being free and living until we're in shucking wheelchairs, that doesn't have to be a lie anymore. We've got a home, we've got a family. Don't let the bastards win. Come on, man. Come on."

Minho had Newt's hand in an iron grip and I was still holding his other hand, drawing slow circles on the back with my thumb, in the way that had always calmed Newt down, focused his attention. Minho had said exactly what we were all thinking. Come on, Newt. Come on. I glanced up at his face and I suddenly saw his eyelids flutter a little, a flicker of an expression cross his pale face. My work brain clicked in and I looked at the monitor by the side of the bed - both the heart rate and the awareness counts were slowly ticking upwards.

"Nurse?" I called. "Nurse Jenny?"

The dark-haired woman spun from the table and put her fingers to Newt's wrist, his pulse point, taking in the monitor herself and biting her lip. She let go and pushed one of the amber call buttons on the far wall. I hated that she was going to need the backup.

"You're going to have to leave, Miss," she said, talking to me, but gesturing all of us back towards the door. "I think he's coming around."

Is it him? We couldn't know.

"You'll let us know, right?" Thomas said as he got up. "If you can help him?"

The nurse smiled kindly, but her expression was distracted, her gaze flicking between Newt and the door. She knew as well as I did that you never want to be alone with someone on the borderline - I hated myself again for thinking about him like that, but what other way was there?

"See you soon, brother." Karly was already at the door as she called back to Newt.

Minho got up slowly, like the last fifteen minutes had leached twenty years from his bones, but he nodded. "We better", then disappeared from the room ahead of the others. I got up from the chair, watching as the movements of Newt's eyelids got more and more frequent, as his fingers started to twitch in mine, something keeping me locked in place, even as I knew I had to leave - for his sake and mine.

"I love you," I said, eventually. Not murmuring, not breathing, not whispering it. "Inevitable, remember? I promised you we'd both get out - don't make me have to lie, N."

Still holding onto his hand, I leant over and gently kissed his forehead, just like he always had with me. Funny - I'd never been able to reach before. Slowly, reluctantly, I let go of his fingers and moved back towards the doorway, just as two, out of breath, doctors ran into the room, Will Oxford close behind them. He caught sight of me and nodded and I just managed to nod back, meeting his eyes as a final plea, before I turned back to Newt before the doctors surrounded him.

"Give them hell for us, Backstreet Boy."

And then we left him. Again.


	34. Returning.

**Chapter 34 - Returning.**

**NEWT'S POV**

It's dark in here. Mostly. There's some light coming in from somewhere behind me, but it's kind of dusty, and there's not enough of it for me to see by.

Where the bloody hell am I?

It's morning. I know that much. I know that by the way the light's coming in through the gaps in the curtains. Curtains? I turn and I know where they are - a couple of meters from the door that's getting less fuzzy every second, the door that Nick and I heaved into place when we'd added this room to the Homestead.

The Homestead?

Fear and confusion makes my stomach flip over and I reach out and yank the curtains to one side, blazing light filling the room. I was right. I'm in the Homestead. There's the picture Dmitri drew because he thought it'd make it seem less like a prison. There's the dent in the floorboards from when Min dropped that buggin' chest on the way to hide 'em. That's Nick's chair and the stick I used for a while when I jacked up my leg that time.

I look back at the curtains that I'm still holding onto, my nails digging into my palms. I go to look past 'em but I don't ever get that far. My hands. They're shaking. But they're smooth - only the tiny white scar that's always been there between my thumb and my first finger. Where are the scars? The black ones, like worms under my skin, proof that I'm rotting away in this goddamn hellhole, I thought - that's it.

I'm thinking.

I'm thinking in a straight line, rather than my brain leading me some merry dance inside my head, five minutes to finish one bloody thought or spitting out fifty all at once. I can't feel the itching anymore. The headache. I can't feel anything except panic that's getting stronger every second. I stagger away from the window, crashing into the table but catching it before I can fall. There are the grooves that Borro carved into it to mark one year here.

Was it a dream? WICKED, the Scorch, Denver...the Flare?

  
  


No. No, it can't have been. I'm not wearing the Glader clothes - I'm wearing blue jeans and a white T-shirt, the one that Lily threw at me on the Berg. Lily. I grab my wrist and it's still there, the comforting leather with her name carved into the side. 'I'm here, N.' I know you are, love. I'm not wearing the Glader clothes, so it can't have been a dream. Plus, why the bloody hell would I sleep in the dining room? And why can't I hear any noise? Not just the noise in my head, the scratching and the whispering and the black-tinted videos that play on a loop, but the Glade noises - the others waking up, moving around, I can't hear anything.

I push the door open, stepping out into the yellow dust of the Glade and I'm back. The Walls tower above me, penning me in, like a buggin' animal again. Except this time, maybe I am one. The Map Room is to the right, I can see the prison in the trees in front of the Deadheads. I can see clearly too; nothing's spinning or blurring or showing up in the wrong colour, dancing in front of my eyes - that isn't possible. But even if my eyes weren't clear, I could clearly see that there's nobody here. The Glade is empty and I'm alone.

  
  


I start walking, because I don't know what else to do. The Doors are open, and I can hear the wind whistling through the central corridors. I'm walking past the Gardens, where Clint cut his head open on a stake, where Zart realised we could grow pumpkins, and I realise I'm not hungry. That's a first. Thank bloody God - looking at the kitchens makes me sick.

I round the corner of the Gardens, out to where the bonfire's piled high and stop dead. There's somebody sitting there. Somebody so familiar that the crossed legs and sloping shoulders turned against me could be mine.

"Well?" Alby calls. "You just gonna stand there, brother? Told ya', ain't no time for slackers round here."

I haven't heard his voice for so long. I thought it forgotten what it sounded like. I don't answer, because I don't know what to say to a ghost, but I do walk towards him, towards the fire that's blazing even though it's broad daylight and we're the only souls around. I come level with him and it's his face. Serious, lined before his time and with a gravity that I never managed to pull off, no matter how hard I tried it.

  
  


"Come on," Alby looks up at me, and smiles the same old smile - so tiny you'd have to know him to know he meant it - and pats the ground next to him. "Sit down then."

I sit down, making sure my back's turned towards the Bloodhouse. I ain't a buggin' sissy, but I can't look at it. It reminds me too much of- I don't want to imagine. I don't want to remember.

"What're you doing here?" I manage eventually - and I'm laughing because he's here and I've missed him so much. I've wanted to ask him so much. "You can't be here."

Alby laughs shortly and he gives me that look that always meant I was an idiot. "I'm your best friend, shuckface," He says, pushing me lightly with his shoulder, which doesn't hurt, but I guess the words do, because something aches in my chest. "You need me. 'Course I'm here."

That's right nice and all - and bloody hell, have I needed someone to say that - but all I can see is him walking towards that mass of pulsing Grievers, tearing him apart. I try to fix him with the same stare, but I can't quite get it right.

"Yeah, but you're dead, Alby. I watched you die."

He tilts his head to one side, like he knows I'm right, but then he looks back at my face and he's serious again and he says:

"Well, you're not much better yourself. You're closer to me than them, brother."

The ache in my chest becomes a hollow. I haven't thought about that. And it's funny, because I suddenly realise that I don't want to be. I've thought about ending it before. So many times. But I haven't realised until this second in this place that can't even be buggin' real that I've never wanted to die. I don't want to die. There are just things - like my Dad, like the useless cog in the Maze, like...whatever I was (am, I don't know) in Denver - that I'd rather die than become. But I don't want to die. I don't want to never listen to one of Minho's stupid sarky comments again, or miss the sunrise, or never play guitar again or see Charlie with a guinea pig or teach Lil to roller skate, to never kiss her again, to miss taking her to England like I promised. I want to live. But not like this.

  
  


I'm staring at the fire, watching the sparks flipping across the logs and the bricks. "So, what happens now?" I murmur. "I'm trapped, Alby. Trapped in my own bloody head."

Alby reaches out and taps my shoulder, turns me so I'm looking at him, waits until I meet his eyes, a couple shades darker than mine.

"You got a choice, Newt. And there ain't no way you're ever gonna remember making it, but it's the most important shucking choice you'll ever make. Ain't no easy cop-out, my friend."

Alby was always intense. One of the first things that ever hit me about him, but right now, I can almost feel his eyes blazing into my skull, willing me to hear every word he says. The old me would make a joke, tell him to 'slim it, before he bursts a buggin' blood vessel'. But this isn't the old me. I ain't sure where he is. So I answer:

"So tell me what to do."

Even I can hear how lost I sound. Something else that's never been me. His face softens a bit and he claps his hand on my shoulder - so familiar that my eyes start to sting - but the intensity of his gaze never wavers.

"Ah, I can't tell ya' that one. They've got you cornered, man. You only got two choices."

I didn't know I had any choices at all. I don't remember the last time I had a choice about anything. Alby lets go and gets to his feet, taking a step away from me and waiting for me to stand too.

"You can come with me now. That's the simple option, brother. You come with me now and it's over. You're done."

Done. The idea of this goddamn chaos freezing, my state of mind freezing is so tempting that I forget to breathe, the burning desperation threatening to overwhelm me - but then I remember something.

  
  


"But if I go with you, I can't see them. I'll never see them."

"No. I told ya', it ain't easy. Come with me, you're done, but there ain't no way back."

Maybe never seeing them is good. Haven't they seen enough of me? Parts of me that I never wanted them to see? Parts of me that aren't even bloody real? Wouldn't they be better with me here? But then I see Lily. I remember what it was like to sneak up behind her, to swing her around, to hear her laugh and I want to do it again so badly that it's almost a physical pain, burning through my chest, my throat. Yes, they're better without me. Without what's left of me. But I'm selfish. I need them.

"What's option two?"

If it's possible, Alby's expression gets even darker, the shadows on his face made clearer by sparks flying from the fire that doesn't make sense. He sighs heavily before meeting my eyes again.

"Option two is you go back."

Oh no.

"You go back and you fight like hell, brother. You give it everything you've got and you fight. Fight like I've seen ya' fight, like I trained ya' to fight. You destroy it, and it can't destroy you - and you go back to them."

I thought misery was an old friend by now, but a wave of anguish sweeps through me, riding on the back of sheer panic.

"I can't! I can't do that! You know me, you know who I am - I-I'm not strong enough, I can't fight that - d'ya hear me, I can't! I can't, Alby!"

I'm shaking. My whole damn body is shaking. He has no idea. He doesn't know how it feels. How it feels to watch your own body from the inside. To be a puppet to some invisible maniac but to be them at the same time. Does he think I haven't bloody tried? That that's not the only damn thing I've been doing for months?

"Bullshit." Alby's voice is firm. "If you weren't a fighter you'd be dead. And I'd never've been seen dead with 'ya - this is hard, shuckface. It'll take a long time, but in the end you'll see them. It'll be the hardest thing you've ever done - the Maze is a molehill next to this bastard, but you fight and you'll do it. I know you. And I'll see you in the end."

My mind spins so fast I barely register what flies through it. Go back? Back to that? I can't fight it - it's like a worm trying to bump off a giant. And I hate it. Bloody hell, I hate it. The mist and the webs and the itching and the hunger and the headaches and the tics and the screaming and the pain and the pain and the pain and the pain and the pain...

"You're slippin', brother. You ain't got long."

Would it be so bad to go with him? I can be with him again. It will stop. All of this will stop... stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop, stop.

But I'm selfish. I need them.

I am slipping, I can feel it - the Glade is flickering, the forest becoming a block of green, the fire a wall of red and gold at the side of my vision. Alby's starting to blur with his hand outstretched to take me with him. Other voices are filtering from somewhere far away, a million miles underwater.

"You're going to have to leave, Miss - I think he's coming around."

  
  


I can feel the webs gathering again and the panic that rises with them, the control I'm surrendering, but I meet his eyes. I know what I want. And I'm done being a coward. Coward, coward, coward... I take a step away from him, backing into the shadows that hadn't been there before.

"I pick option two."

I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it, I can't do it. But, as the mist begins to cloud my vision, Alby whispers four more words, an almost proud smile on his face as the blackness consumes me, locking me inside.

"I knew you would."


	35. Flashbacks, Fire Ants and Unexpected Friendship

**Chapter 35 - Flashbacks, Fire Ants and Unexpected Friendship**

**NEWT'S P.O.V - The Next Day**

It hurts.

It hurts it hurts it hurts it hurts - why are those lights so bright? TURN IT OFF, TURN IT OFF! There are ants in my head and they're biting and it hurts and you're making it worse. Worse, worse, worse. STOP! STOP LOOKING AT ME! People in their yellow room with their clipboards and their bright lights, go away, go away, go away. I scream at them and it hurts my throat, more pain, more fire.

"Isaac!" Tall man, blonde hair, stethoscope, doctor stereotype, you don't know me, with your hands up like that. You've handcuffed me, so how can I reply? Go away, go away, away! I scream and there are words in it, and he moves away. Good, good, go away, go away. Don't touch me. I'm a monster, you know? Don't touch me.

These white clothes itch on my skin, the ants have crawled out of my head and they're spreading and biting so I itch everywhere and I'm on fire - did you know your bloody eyeballs can itch? I didn't, I didn't, I didn't before the ants told me. I want to scratch them, knock them off but I can't, I can't, because you've cuffed my hands and I can't move. No, no, no. Where am I? I've done this before, I've been a prisoner before, I'm not letting anyone take me again - bright lights, stethoscope, clipboards, not again. WICKED isn't any bloody good. What do you want, what to do you want to do to me now? NO, NO, NO. You can cry and scream and the same time too, you know. I'm very good at it.

There's too much noise - too many voices inside, outside my head. Too many people in the room, too many people in me. I can't hear you, speak louder, speak louder - not that loud! It hurts. It bloody hurts. I can see your room, your people, but there are colours and pictures that my head wants too - concrete walls, Ma still on a carpet, Lily laughing in a forest, dustbins in a Denver street, a Berg in the Scorch - and they play their own noises. I can see your people talking, Doctor. How sweet that you think I can hear them. Too much, too much, no, no. I don't want to be a guinea pig again, I'm broken anyway, broken, broken and a monster. I scream and scream and I twist but I can't move my hands. The people with the clipboards shuffle back. They look scared. Good. Leave me alone, don't hurt me again. Please, please, please.

"Newt!" My name. A new man. Small, smaller than me. Brown hair. Hands up too. I can't do that. "I'm Will - can you talk to us, Newt? Come on now."

Will is frowning. But he has kind eyes. Green ones. He looks worried, but not worried like he's scared of me. Worried like he knows. Do you know it hurts, Will? I step towards him, and I want to speak, I want to tell him that I'm on fire but there's a gunshot in my head and I'm jumping back, hands on my ears and I scream because it's so, so loud and I keep hearing it and I can feel my head hitting the concrete and my shoulder feels like a hole. Tommy. No, no, no. I scream and kick at the people, don't touch me. Don't touch me. It hurts.

"Lily!"

What? Some of the people are shouting her name and looking at me. You've trapped her too. No, no, no. She's good, she's good, she doesn't belong here. She's not broken, she's perfect - she's a bird, you see, but you can't keep her here. Don't cage her now. Let her go, let her go, let her go. I scream, for her, for me. A man, thick glasses, a shirt that's too small shouting: "Lily, Newt! Think about Lily!"

I always think about her. Always, always. You don't have any right to think about her - please don't hurt her, not again - no right. No right.

I don't need hands, I can still hurt you.

The people panic when I run and some of them disappear. There's a door somewhere. The tall man has a spiky pen and he grabs my arm. I throw him off, hearing him crash against a chair, but not before he sticks something in me that I can feel all the way up my arm, shaking. It hurts, it hurts, but it the hurting is stopping. I can still feel the ants but the ants are slowing down. I'm on the floor - how did I get here? It's not concrete, its a carpet, soft, soft and fluffy. The ants are slowing down and I can't move my hands, but I can't move my arms or my legs either. What have you done to me? I try to scream but it's more of a mewl. The panic is so strong it's a pain in the pit of my stomach. If I could move, I'd be sick.

"Okay. I'm with you, Oxford. I think there's something in it. But we're talking long-term sedation here. Four months at least."

"Alright. Alright, just let me try and help him."

What? Help me, yes, help me, please, I can't move. And I can't hear anymore and the noises have stopped playing in my head and I'm frightened. I'm frightened but it all goes dark.

**SIX MONTHS LATER**

The ceiling is blue. That's the first thing I notice. The ceiling at WICKED was always white. Where am I? I'm tired of asking that question. I'm tired. I'm just tired. I try to turn my head to see the room, but it feels like I'm moving through a sea of treacle, it happens so slowly. My muscles feel like they've rusted together, rusted with my bones and tendons, and it hurts to even move my neck like that. It hurts.

The yellow room. The spiky pen. Blackness. It doesn't hurt so much now. The itching is still there, I realise, scratching away at the back of my head, enough to make it pound with the beginnings of a headache - shuck it, ow, ow, ow - but I'm not screaming anymore. I can think. It's like thinking through a swamp that's someone's thrown litter and shopping trolleys and bits of metal into, but I can think.

The room isn't all that big. There are two padded chairs in the corner, a rug on the floor, some crutches by the door, a table with nothing but a desk lamp and the bed I'm lying on. I push myself up onto my elbows, muttering 'Ow, ow, ow' as pain lances up my arms from my wrists. The black worms are still there, dark and raised on my skin. Go away. Above the bed is a whiteboard with the words: "Isaac 'Newt' Newton" and 'Care of Will Oxford' scrawled onto it. Will Oxford? Who's that - a scientist?

I push myself up even more until I'm sitting up, tiny bolts of pain shooting from all the muscles I try to move and making me gasp. This is a different kind of pain. I don't know if it's better. As I do, something tugs on my arm and I look down. There's a drip in one of the veins of my hand. I pull it out. Ow. Just then, the door opens.

I jump and a tic in my neck starts up, the muscle spasming so my head snaps to the side, jarring my whole body and sending a wave of irritation through me.

"Hi Newt." I recognise the man standing on the rug. He's got brown hair and green eyes. He frowns, like he's worried and says: "Sorry - I didn't mean to make you jump. That looked painful."

"It was." I slowly swing my legs round to the side of the bed, grimacing as my head snaps to the side again. "Where am I? Where am I? Who are you? Is this another bloody experiment?"

The man looks sad and takes another step towards me, warily, slowly, so I know what he's doing. "No." He's shaking his head vehemently. "No, Newt, it's not. I promise all that's over now. You're in New York, in the biggest Flare Rehabilitation Centre in the city."

"What does that mean?" I shoot back at him. "What does that mean? Sounds a lot like the places WICKED used to shack us up."

The man sits down slowly on the far end of the bed, and I shrink back. Don't touch me. I'm a monster.

"It's a hospital of sorts, I guess." The man says, "You were brought here from Denver 'cause you were really sick, Newt. Do you remember that?"

Laughter bubbles up in my chest and I can't help it, even though it hurts, I'm laughing until I'm doubled over, until the sound rings off the walls. "Remember that?" I manage through the laughter. "Oh yes, yes, yes, yes. I think I remember that!"

I'm shouting the last few words, the laughter dying in my throat as quickly as it showed up. Remember that. I think you'd remember that. Remember being trapped in your own bloody skull. Remember fighting and screaming and itching and-

"Of course - I'm sorry. That wasn't a great choice of words, was it?" The man looks sorry. "I haven't done this many times. Anyway, you're here firstly because you're cured. There isn't a trace of the Flare virus left in your cells. But, you have suffered some serious mental damage as a result of the Flare, so you'll be here with us for a couple of months until your mind has recovered as well as your body and you'll be back to yourself. My name's Will - I'll be your supervisor while you're in here, your go-to-guy."

I don't have the Flare. There's a cure. I don't have the Flare. I want to laugh but then I just want to cry. So why does my head hurt? Why am I still seeing colours, why aren't the scars gone, why are all my tics still there? I can't answer at first, the swamp in my head makes it buggin' impossible to process his bombshell and talk at the same time.

"It still hurts." I whisper, touching my head lightly with my fingertips, tracing a line down to my neck. "Not as deep. But it still hurts. Hurts."

Will nods and slides a bit closer to me. That's close enough, close enough, stop.

"Yeah. I know. But most of that isn't your mind anymore, it's just your muscles warming up. You've been unconscious on the drugs for six months, Newt."

I try to stand up, pushing up on my hands, but something in my leg buckles and I fall back onto the bed. "Six months! Six shucking months!"

Will nods again and gives me a wry smile that somehow makes the panic shrink a bit. "Trust me when I say you needed it. As for standing up-" He gestured to my legs and then to the crutches by the door. "- again, you've been lying down for six months. You'll need those crutches for a while. We might even try a wheelchair today - short term, I promise."

I nod, even though I hate it, because this man is nice and this man is trying to help me. Will has a cut on his forehead, I realise. Ow. I reach out slowly, and he doesn't even flinch, letting me trace the scabbed gash with my fingertips. "Does that hurt?" I ask quietly.

Will wrinkles his nose and tilts his head to one side. "A bit, I guess. When you poke it like that, yeah it does." I pull my hand back quickly, muttering 'sorry, sorry, sorry' and he laughs. "Don't worry. It hurt more when I did it. It was a shelf I hadn't screwed in right - slid out the other morning."

I go to brush my hair off my forehead to show him my scar, but there isn't as much of it as usual. They cut my hair. I point to the scar connected to my left eyebrow. "I've got one like that. It was a cupboard."

Will laughs again, but not cruelly. "Yeah, I heard. Yours is a bit deeper than mine, I think." Another wry smile.

There's a plant that helps with cuts. I can't remember. We used it in the Glade but I can't remember. My ma used to show me, but I don't remember. Oh.

"Dock leaves." I mumble.

"What?"

"Dock leaves, dock leaves." I point at his cut. "Ma had a bottle of it. Used to help."

Will looks confused for a second, but then his face clears. "Oh - I always thought it was witch hazel. But I could try it - thank you."

He's smiling at me, but I've stopped looking at him, inspecting my war wounds. The black scars are on my legs too - go away, go away - but there's another one on the back of my right calf. A long puckered line, that wasn't there before, scarred white, thick and bulbous and I remember - it's dark in Denver. The streetlight isn't working and I'm too tired to move to somewhere else. Stupid, stupid, stupid. They found me. The hunters. And I'm too tired to run. The man leaning over me has breath that smells worse than the animal klunk in the Glade, his teeth are yellow, and there's a long wrinkled, white scar all the way down the side of his face. 'Bet you were a pretty one once, bucko...' His voice sounds like grinding metal. 'You ain't one of them no more - what makes you too good to be one of us, eh? Eh?' His knife is sharp and curved and I don't have one. He traces it along the line of my throat, while his pack cackle behind him. I'm shaking so much that he could kill me, one wrong move could kill me. I don't have a knife, but there's an iron bar in the dust. I don't want to, but, but...

"Newt!" Will, not the man. I can hear him, but I can't answer him. My knees are pulled up to my chest, my hands over my ears. Get me out, get me out, get me out. Nausea is pounding through my body and I'm shaking, I can feel the steel on my skin, I can feel it. Will takes my hand, gently, and runs his thumb over the back of it in slow circles, grounding me. "Hey, come on now," He says. "Come on now. You're safe here. Come on now."

Gradually, I wrestle my breathing under control and pull my other hand away from my ear, looking up at Will, still tracing the circles on my hand, who says, "It's okay. You had some surgery on that leg, to try and fix the damage you did at WICKED. That's all the scar is."

His face is blurring with the face of the man. I start to nod slowly, but then something occurs to me and I rip my hand out of his, skittering back to the head of the bed. The panic's starting up again. My brain doesn't seem to focus on one thing for more than one bloody second.

"How did you know to do that?" I snap, fear ebbing in. Will is frowning, but he doesn't speak. He's waiting for me to explain. "With my hand. My hand - how did ya' know that would work? My Ma used to do that. Lily used to do that. How did you know?"

"I saw-" Will starts, but pauses and starts the sentence again. "I've got two little sons myself."

He pulls a wallet out of his back pocket and holds it out to me. "Do you want to see?"

Yes.

I nod, moving forward a bit on the bed, my wrist snapping this time and Will grimaces in sympathy. He pulls out a photograph of him on some grass with two wee kids on his lap. One looks about five with messy dark brown curls, the other maybe two with lighter, golden brown hair. He's wearing a Spider-Man costume. They're right cute.

"I know because my youngest's convinced there's a bogeyman in the cupboard. I have to check every night, but he still wakes up screaming, even when he knows there's nothing there. Being a Dad has really streamlined my 'calming down' skills." Will tells me. "I don't have an ulterior motive, Newt. I promise, there's no villain this time. I just want to help."

Isn't there always a villain? Always, always, always. Show me a time in my life when there hasn't been a bloody villain. If it isn't you, then that only leaves...

"I don't think you're the bogeyman." I reply. "No...I don't. No. You were kind to me. When everybody was shouting and driving shucking nails into my skull?"

"What?"

"In that room, that room," My memory isn't good enough, it's all too bloody dark. "The yellow room."

Surprise raises Will's eyebrows. "Oh! I didn't think you'd remember that. And good, I'm glad to hear it."

"I do." I look back at the boys in the sunlight. "What are their names? Your sons?"

"That's Arthur-" Will points at the older one, "- and that's Danny. Daniel."

Danny. Danny. 'You see those fireworks, Danny? Those are the colours you paint your dreams with, okay?'

I smile a little, even though the name sends a sudden pang through my chest. "Danny... my name was Danny once."

Will nods, matching my smile and says: "Yes. Yes, Lily did mention that to me."

What? He's seen Lily. He's seen her. No, no, no, no, no. Has she seen me? I don't want her to know. She can't know. I don't want her to know. Her face in the alley in Denver, horrified, her hazel eyes enormous under the glare of the streetlights. 'You're one of the good guys, remember?' She really believed that then - if she saw me now, she wouldn't think that. She can't see me, he mustn't tell her, he mustn't tell her. Pure anger floods through me, almost as crippling as the pain. Will looks up, and he groans, rubbing his forehead with his hand.

"I forgot to mention, as she's listed as your next of kin, along with Min-"

"They can't know!" The growl rips from my throat, through my clenched teeth. "What the bloody hell are you telling them?"

Will puts his hands up in front of me, a gesture of innocent surrender that only fuels the anger. "Newt, there's nothing wrong, they understand that-"

"No! You don't know that!" I'm practically spitting, shaking. "I'm a shucking monster - I don't want them to see me! This isn't the guy who was their friend, okay?" I'm gasping for breath, inviting him to look at the mess I've made of my body. "You have no bloody right to tell them anything! Anything, anything!" The fury, the shame, is like a screen in front of my eyes, my senses, and I raise my arm to show him that no shucking psychobabble can ever make up for that, when he shouts.

"Newt! Newt, you don't want to do that." You wanna bet? They mustn't know. Will jumps up and grabs a photo frame that I hadn't seen before. "You're better than that. I know it. They know it. Look-"

He tosses the photo frame into my hands as quickly as he can. "Look. Look. You might not feel like the person they love, the person they've told me you are, but that isn't going to last. You can fight this. You might feel alone, but every one of those people is behind you."

I look at the frame, running my trembling fingers across it. It's you, it's you, it's you. I don't know where the photo was taken. It's a big room with a purple sofa, high up - you can see skyscrapers out of the windows - Lily's perched on the arm of the sofa, smiling at the camera. 'This isn't you, N.' No. No, I know. I take a shuddering breath in, pulling the photo closer. Karly's next to her, one arm around her waist. 'Hear, hear', another breath.

"They love you so much. And they believe in you, utterly. So do I. You've got so many people in your corner, you just need to believe in yourself too. You haven't lost that person, Newt. He's still there. You don't need to be the same person, because none of them are. You've all grown, you've all changed, and that's not a bad thing - you're becoming something new, and you get to choose who that is. Nobody's choosing for you anymore."

Minho is sitting next to Karly wearing some bloody awful vest top and doing bunny ears behind her head. I start to laugh and I see Will's shoulders go down. Clint is next to Minho, doing finger guns and Gally - Gally, weird - is on the other side of him, sandwiched between Brenda and - no.

My head starts to spin again, my vision blurring as my memories try to suck me under. No, no. Tommy. No, no, no. Dark tunnels, the outskirts of Denver. A gun that I gave him. Kill me, kill me. No, no. He was crying. The concrete. The sky that was totally grey. The words I said - God, God, God.

"Get out!" I scream, the anger surging up again, making my throat seem no wider than a pinhole. I pull myself upwards on the bedside table and I can feel my eyes burning, tears mingling with liquid fury. Will moves backwards towards the door, his eyes wide. There's fear there now.

"Newt-"

"No! Get out!" Thomas was crying. I can't, Newt, I can't.' With all the strength I've got, I hurl the frame at Will, who ducks as it hits the doorframe and shatters on the floor. I scream again and again. "Get out! Get out! Get the bloody hell out!"

Will gives me a long look, but I can't look at him and he turns and leaves, the door closing with a click and the sound of something locking. Trapped, trapped, get out, can't get out now. I turn back, so I can't see the door, can't see the photo, can't see the glass on the carpet and I sink to the floor.

"Please just leave me alone."

2 1/2 MONTHS LATER

Click. I twist the blue puzzle piece around between my fingers - Click - which means I can get that yellow one in there - wait, no, purple one first - click, click. The green one slides in easily after that - yes - and I pick up the red one to snap it into place, but my fingers spasm and it goes skittering across the floor instead, smacking into the leg of the armchair where I can't reach it, because one of my hands is chained to the wall. Damn.

I put that one to one side and lean across to grab another puzzle from the bedside cabinet. Ow, ow, ow. The handcuff digs into my wrist, leaning a red line across it as I pull the next puzzle into my lap - a weaving-type thing - and start weaving the strands around each other with my free hand. It feels kind of weird to be practicing for a Flare Grade Test while handcuffed to the wall, like I'm kidding myself, but here we are. It's early, I think. Not long after 06:00 - breakfast here isn't 'til 7:30 but three years in the Maze wakes me up at 5:30 and I can't do much about it.

Red, green, blue strands, round and round my fingers. This isn't that hard yet. I wonder what the others are doing this morning. Does Minho have work? If not he'll definitely be conked out. Has Charlie fed the guinea pig yet? Is Lily awake? Is she looking at the birds and the people in the parks? I want to know even though every piece of information aches because it's secondhand. I haven't been working at this puzzle that long when a silhouette passes over the curtains outside my room and the door swings open.

"Morning, morning, morning!" It's Will. He's smiling and I hope Arthur's party went well.

"Hi." I answer as he closes the door behind him. My attention is torn between him, the puzzle and the red piece on the floor so I can't quite match his enthusiasm. Will walks over to the bed and looks over my shoulder at the weaving puzzle.

"Not bad, kiddo. Nice - how long'd that take?"

"Not sure. Five, five minutes? Can you pass me that one, please?"

Will scoops up the piece on the floor and hands it to me and I slot it back into the puzzle. There. I watch his eyes flick between the puzzle and my other hand, locked to the rail on the wall and he sighs heavily.

"I thought we were past this." He gestures to the rail. "You don't need to do that anymore, Newt."

Yesterday. That stupid comment. The red mist. The door I'd slammed and run from while I still could.

"I nearly hit him." I say, turning my eyes back to the puzzle. Will nods, tilting his head to one side.

"But you didn't. Newt, if people outside got locked up for what they nearly did, then there'd be more prisons than public toilets out there."

I laugh at that. "I don't know - there could be, for all I bloody know. But I nearly hit him, Will."

"But that was yesterday. And you didn't." Will walks over to a splintering dent in the plaster on the far side of the room and smiles, turning back to me to raise his eyebrows. "Good hole in the wall, though."

I glance down at my scraped knuckles. Ow. "Sorry, sorry," I murmur. "Just didn't want to risk it."

Will understands. He nods and says: "Safe call, I guess. To be honest, if he'd carried on being a misogynistic prick much longer, I might have hit him."

He drags the armchair over so it's facing me and sits down in it. "Did you sleep like that, Jailbird?"

Just then, a tic shows up in my shoulder and twists the muscle, making my whole body jolt backwards into the head of the bed and a dull thud echo around the tiny room as pain rushes through me and kips down in the back of my head.

"Shuck it," I hiss, "And no, no, no, I didn't." I glare at the offending shoulder and then smile. "Erin unlocked the cuff when she gave me my shot last night. Probably a good thing, if it'd've done that all bloody night. I'd've been dog tired this mornin'-"

"And much grumpier." Will adds with a teasing grin. He knows me by now. I hate shoulder tics and head tics more than anything. They're the only ones that can stop you doing shucking everything. "Why'd you put it back then?"

"My head hurts today." My head hurts all the time - ow, ow, ow - but I've learned to tune out, mostly. But it hurts like a mother today and it's already throwing me off - even without bloody shoulder tics. "Didn't want to risk it."

Too scared to risk it. Will nods again, like he isn't going to say any more about it, accepting my judgement and my eyes wander around the room again. My guitar is standing in the corner - a mahogany one with rosewood details. Lily, Minho and the others bought it for my birthday back in December - my twentieth birthday. I'm twenty. In fact, by now, I'm closer to twenty-one. It seems incredible that I've made it this far. But Will wouldn't actually give me the guitar until I'd passed my Orange Grade Test a month ago - which makes sense, I 'spect, in case I'd decided to throw it. I can play it again now, most of the time, and it's good therapy for when the Flare mist decides to descend and I lock myself in here rather than screw up anybody else's day. The wrist I've locked into the the handcuff spasms against the metal as I look - a reminder that I can't play anything today - and I wince.

"You okay?" Will looks up.

"In general," I reply. "Put this on the wrong bloody wrist and it hurts now. It hurts, Will. It hurts. Ugh." I growl at the repetitions I can't stop. "That won't get me past the buggin' Grade Test, will it?"

"Well, it doesn't sound great, but you weren't doing that as much a few days ago. The repeating. You're stressing about it, and I think that's making it worse."

I nod and lean back as far as I can, still attached to the wall, and close my eyes. "I know. But then I worry about bloody worrying about it. I can't win!"

We both laugh - it's getting easier to laugh at the Flare's enigmas than to cry about 'em, now I know I can kick it - and Will pulls two thermos cups out of his rucksack.

"Tea?" He asks.

"Yes, please." This means that we're about to have A Serious Discussion. That's when Will cracks out the thermos. He pours two cups out and hands me one, while I brace myself. Please don't be about my Triggers...

"How close to yourself do you feel you are, now, Newt?" Will asks, scooting forward in his chair and leaning his elbows on his knees. And there it is...

"That's a big question for 6:30 in the morning." And not one I really want to search my shucked head for the answer to. Maybe because I've never been that sure of 'myself'. Will doesn't let me ignore it, watching me with his sharp green eyes, and even if I didn't say anything, he'd read it in my face.

"Don't swerve," He chided. "Yeah, it is. Think about it for me."

I think about it. "I'm stronger now than I was. I can stand and run. I don't need the stick much. My limp's actually better - you can't really even see the thing."

'Okay, so that's physically. How about you?"

I think about it. "I'm still a bloody hothead... and I was never like that. That was one of my best qualities, I reckon, that I never really got mad like the others did."

Will nodded, skilfully leaving a gap for me to elaborate in.

"I'm still meaner, I think. I give people less room for stuff. And mood swings-"

I shoot Will an apologetic look and he laughs and finished the sentence for me, "-are still a problem. I'm just glad you've stopped throwing picture frames at me."

He took a long sip of tea, then leaned back in the chair, his eyes half-closed, like he was picking his words. Oh no. "I'm going to throw a strange phrase at you now, Newt."

"Okay."

"Would you ever say you were a bad person? As a Crank?"

Yes. The voices in my head - both the Flare and my own paranoia - spat the answer straight back at me. But then Lily's voice breaks in: 'you're one of the good guys, remember?' And it's just not that bloody simple. This time, Will doesn't rush me because he can see that I'm thinking about it.

"I think..." I say slowly, twisting the handcuffed wrist until it stopped clicking. "I think I could be. Past tense, I mean. I think there were times when anybody watching would have called me a bad person in Denver. And I guess the worst bloody part is that I don't remember. I ain't gonna remember - I could be a serial killer and I ain't gonna remember-"

"You aren't a serial killer." Will said. "You'd remember enough of that. Carry on."

"Okay. So I might have done bad things in Denver, but I...I don't know that that makes me a bad person. I've been thinkin', now I've met some other Cranks in here, and think about the Cranks I met out there...I'm not sure that the people being cruel, being bad people, wasn't about where we were. Wasn't because of how shucking frightened we were - doesn't matter whether you were old, young, fast, slow, innocent, all-knowing, you were bloody frightened. Wasn't about just tryin' to survive. I've met people now that are as sick, sicker than me, and I wouldn't call anybody here bad. We're just sick. And now we're here, we don't have to be sick and do the really awful things to keep bloody breathing. We're just sick."

Will doesn't reply for a while, just watching me, considering it as he drinks his tea, so I shoot back at him.

"What do you think?"

His eyes widen in surprise and now he answers quickly. "Oh, I don't think you're a bad person, Newt. I think you're an inherently good person, in fact. But yes...I see what you mean about good people being forced to do bad things. I think that's it. I don't think merely having the Flare necessarily makes you a bad person, though it can do, if you're not careful."

I look down at the black rope-like scars on my arms, I can feel them standing out on my neck, can feel the itching in the back of my skull.

"But it's funny," I say, crossing my legs under me. "I'm not that much bloody better, am I? Am I? Am I?"

"You're a lot better." Will argues as he glances at his watch and packs the thermos away, scary questions fired. He chuckles lightly. "You don't remember much of that first day, but McAdams was convinced you were going to kill him."

The tall man. He's been nicer to me since than I probably deserve.

"Have I told him I'm sorry? I don't think I have told him I'm sorry. Tell him I'm sorry, Will."

"Will do, kiddo." Will gets up and fishes the key for the handcuffs out of the top drawer. I don't question it.

"How sick do you reckon I am now?" I ask as Will twists the key in the lock. He wrinkles his nose and makes a humming sound.

"Honestly? I'd say 30, 35%, maybe? Won't know for sure 'til your Test later."

Later. What if I fail? I can't do another test for a fortnight if I fail and that's another fortnight that I'm not out there. But there's another voice whispering too - what if you're not good enough? What if you're still batshit crazy and they just haven't noticed? What if you've still got the virus? What if what if what if. I don't answer and Will guesses what I'm thinking, like always. He gently detaches the handcuffs from my arm and sits down next to me. I can manage close now. Will is a friend. I've got that far in my head. But I can see too how he'll be a good father. Like now - he rests one hand on my shoulder and turns me so I can see his face.

"Newt. You can pass this test. Okay? It's one of many and one of many that you're going to excel in. Your control and your percentage are well into Yellow Grade territory. You're not an Orange Rated patient anymore on anything but the documents. All you've got to do is answer a few questions, walk around a bit and solve a few puzzles - much easier ones than you're already doing on your own. Don't stress. You'll walk it, kiddo."

I hope so. Then Will lets go and moves to put the handcuffs back in the medical drawer.

"Aren't you going to put those back on?" I ask, offering him the wrist that hasn't got tiny scratches all round it from the last two hours.

He shakes his head and holds his hand out to me - first thing in the morning, anything is possible with the Flare, including falling straight over when I try to stand up - and I take it with a questioning expression.

"Nope," Will tells me. "Come on. It's nearly seven on a Thursday morning, Newt."

And he moves off towards the door. He's still holding my wrist, supporting me and I don't have any choice but to follow the guy.

"And that means?" I question as we start to make our way down the outer corridors of the Rehab centre, which are starting to fill with all the usual morning characters and general hubbub. We walk past old Mr Oak's room as he opens his curtains and he flaps his hand at me in a frantic wave. I smile and start to wave, but my wrist tic spasms my arm backwards instead and he laughs.

"You'll see." Will replies. This makes me nervous and makes my neck tic twitch. Surprises have become one of my least favourite things, but I decide to change the subject.

"How was Arthur's party?" I ask him. It works. Will's face immediately lights up as we reach the corridor with the all the big windows onto the city, waking up too.

"Oh, so good!" Will grins. "My mother in law didn't make a single disparaging comment, Danny had fun too, Arthur loved the fire engine I picked - he loved the tiny fireman you made him out of that wood and said to say thank you. He also wanted to know if you could shed your skin, like the newts in class?"

I bark a laugh as we approach the corner of the corridor overlooking the Main Street outside. "No, unfortunately. Damn, that'd be cool though. Tell him I wish I could."

"Will do. The cake was a huge success too, though there was a hairy moment when-" Will stops mid-sentence, looking out of the window nearest to him. "Look. Come here, Newt. Look there."

At first I don't see anything. The grass verges look exactly the same as they always do from these windows. The buses going by are the same, the signs haven't moved, the same amount of slow-moving traffic inching its way along the road outside. That's not to say I couldn't watch it for hours - I could. When you've lived the life that we have, there are some things that don't get boring. But then I do see it. There's a path that winds from the nearby parks into the Centre that cuts across the grass verges below the window. By the gate is a small figure in a red duffel coat, navy boots and a white beret. It's a girl, walking quickly, because it ain't all that warm out. She's got dark brown hair, spilling out under the beret, and there's something about that springing, determined walk that always comes back to one person. But that can't be her. The figure walks past the first few entrance buildings along the path over the verges and suddenly stops outside our building, 'A' Block, slap bang in the middle of the path.

"What's she doing?" I ask Will. "Has she forgotten something?"

"Just look at her, Newt." Is all he says.

Right then, the girl looks up, her face blushed and rosy in the cold, and I feel like someone's reached into my chest and squeezed my heart, so hard it's beating double time, blood rushing through my body. The hazel eyes, that I can't see from here, but my memory fills in, the tumbling brown curls, the way she's bouncing on the balls of her feet, looking at the windows, like she's only waiting for the wind before she takes off and flies. Lily.

Lily, Lily, Lily. Lily. The two syllables thrum in every heartbeat and I freeze, everything in me aching, but Will doesn't. He knew and he waves. Lily sees him and starts to wave back. But she freezes too. Because she sees me.

No, no, no. She thinks I'm a monster. She can't know.

She can't know. I go to turn, to run back, but Will's support of my arm has morphed into an iron grip and I can't move. She can't know. But Lily is already moving - nothing stops her for long, she's continual motion - one hand over her mouth, she's bouncing again but she's waving this time. She's waving at me. She moves her hand and she's smiling. But she's crying too - I remember the way she'd sweep under her eyes with her fingertips. Lily's there. She's really there. And bloody hell, I've never seen anything more beautiful.

I miss you, I miss you, I miss you. And I wave back, smiling. You're real. This is all real.

"She does that every day. On her way to 'C'." Will says softly, even though he knows I'm not looking at him.

"But why's she crying?"

"Because you've never been there before."

Oh, Lilybird. Bloody hell, I miss you. So much. So much. She waves and cries and smiles, but then she jumps and pulls something out of her pocket. It's flashing red and even I know what it is - a ringing pager. Lily looks back up at our window and waves one more time, before pointing back, almost apologetically at C Block, just out of sight. I nod and smile and wave and watch her until she disappears around the corner. And then I watch the space she had occupied on that corner, the image of the girl in the red duffle coat holding me in place until the Flare gives me a kick along with the shock and my knee buckles. I slide down to the floor, my back against the cool plaster of the wall. My heart is beating like a drum and I can feel the echoes of each one, like ripples on water, through my chest. I'm shaking, but I'm not afraid. As if it was glass, not leather, I run my fingers over her name on the leather wristband she'd given me the day I'd guessed her other one. The day I'd promised her I'd bring it back. Almost there, love. Almost there.

Will just stands there, leaning on the windowsill, waiting. Eventually, I look up at him and he smiles and offers me his hands.

"Was that a test?" I ask, accepting his offer and staggering to my feet.

"Not a serious one," Will replied, looking out over the morning commuters of New York. "I did want to see if you could take it - seeing her again, the memories. You did really well."

"I-I-I loved it. I love her."

That's when Will's gaze returns to me. He's still smiling, and I watch him twist the ring on his left hand around once, and he's looking at me with that strange mix of an invested friend and an analysing psychologist. He loops his arm through mine again - if I wasn't sure I could make it down here before, I definitely bloody can't now - and we start to walk back towards the main rooms together.

"Do you want to do that again tomorrow?"

"With you?" I check. "Yes! Yes, please. But not on my own."

"Of course." Will understands. He knows what I'm afraid of. We walk for a couple of turns in silence, my eyes darting around the corridor like they always do, from person to door handle, to equipment to brightly-coloured curtains and then I say:

"Why did ya' test me today? If Lil's always done that. Why did you test me today? Is it to do with the Grade Test?"

Will pulls a face as we turn back into our corridor. "Sort of." He replies, again putting his words together carefully, as if this conversation is a jigsaw that won't quite fit together otherwise. "If you pass your test today, I'm considering giving you a roommate in a few weeks."

"A roommate!" Somebody I can't run from. They'd have to see things, parts of me that are only passing over me for a while, parts that I'm choosing to throw out. They might help me do it. Maybe I could help them. Start what I'd always told the others I would do - something worthwhile.

"Yeah," Will pushes open the door to the Dining Hall and follows me in. "With your permission, obviously - I'd never force anything like that on you. But we had a guy come in a few weeks ago from a settlement near the old WICKED Complex - he'll be under sedation for another few weeks - but I spoke to your friends and I hear you know him, and that might be good for both of you."

It's my turn to wrinkle my nose - though not as effectively, 'cause my head snaps to one side simultaneously, sending a bolt of pain down my spine this time.

"Who is it?"

"A boy called Jackson."

A MONTH LATER

I'm curled in one of the armchairs in my room - our room, now, I guess - trying to finish the book Will's lent me, but my attention keeps wandering from the letters on the page. It's a good book - just looks like my head's not playing ball. I've been helping out the nurses with the shelving in the Common Room and I'm tired, which - now I'm at 20% and Dark Green Graded - is the only time my Flare really plays up, beyond the occasional snap. Instead, I lean back on the sofa arm and look up at the ceiling and count the lines on the air vents, running my fingers around the green plastic band on my wrist, then twist all the way back to watch my roommate.

Jackson's asleep on the other bed, still in his clothes from the co-ordination session he had with Will before lunch. From the look Will shot me over our tomato soup a few hours ago, I'm guessing it wasn't a sparkling session. Jackson looks almost exactly how I remember him. Coppery curls, blue eyes, shorter than he'd like to be, plus the twisted black scars up his arms and ankles. Jax was always effervescent - bouncy to the point of being annoying back in the Glade - but now, it's a bit like someone's taken that light and drawn some curtains round it. It's still there, but it ain't anything like as bright. We were never the best of mates in the Glade - he had his brothers and I had mine - but we'd always got on, I've always liked the kid. He's been my roommate for two weeks now, and I still like him. I want to help the shank.

He was a lower percentage when he got in here - 57 rather than my bloody rabid 83, god knows how - his scars don't go above his elbows and he's already on Orange Grade and coming down faster than me. He's got the Yellow Grade Test the day after tomorrow and swings between feeling just about okay about it and screaming mad about the whole thing and calling it all off.

Right now, he's collapsed on the bed, but he ain't sleeping easy. Tiny frowns keep scuttling over his face, and he makes these small gasping sounds, flinching a little. I frown too and try to pick up my book again. The words are all blurring on the page. Well, that ain't happening. I go back to counting, the tiles on the carpet this time, when Jackson's murmurs turn into cries:

"No! No, please!" He's thrashing suddenly, his hands out to beat off an invisible enemy.

I'm on my feet in a second and over by his bed. I know what those dreams feel like. I wish I didn't.

"Jax!" I call, putting my hand on his shoulder. "Jackson!"

"Please don't!" He's almost sobbing, poor kid, not seeming to feel my hands. "I'm, I'm sorry, please!"

"Jackson!" I kneel on the edge of the bed and shake him, roughly. "Jax - it's me, Newt. Come on, brother, it's not real. Jackson!"

Jackson flies bolt upright with a muffled gasp, almost slamming his forehead into mine and making me cringe back, reflex taking over. I wait for him to come back into the room, sitting cross-legged on the floor, where he can see me. Gradually, his breathing gets less ragged, his eyes lose that shucked haunted expression and he looks down at me, as if it was me he was seeing, not what was in his head.

"Newt? S-sorry. Sorry- I - sorry..."

I wrinkle my nose and pat his knee from my spot on the carpet. "Sorry? Sorry nothin', ya' lug. Where were ya'?"

He rubs his eyes with the heels of his hands, his hair sticking up in every direction. "That village. The one with the cult...shuck it, I thought they were going to kill me,

Newt. They said they would. For what 'you people do'. They said they'd kill me, kill me, kill me."

He's shaking and I trade the carpet tile for a seat on his bed, putting an arm around his shoulders. Jackson's only couple of months younger that me, but it feels like years right now. "I know," I tell him. "But you're safe here. Nobody can get ya'. Nobody's ever going to now. We kick this bloody bug and we're free. For real, man."

He nods slowly, leaning into my arm and eventually replies, "Yeah...yeah. But is it always going to be like this?"

Jackson's expression is bleak as he waves his arms at the blue bedroom. I don't understand.

"What do you mean?" I ask. He growls, and I know that frustration, not getting the words in your head out of your mouth, but then he says:

"I mean - are we ever going to be free, really? Or is that just more shuck psychobabble to stop us freaking out on them? What's the use in being 'free' if every time I close my eyes I'm back there, every time I blink, I'm back back back in the Homestead listening to the Grievers or fighting in the Maze, or being blown apart in the Scorch or eating dead cats in some backstreet somewhere 'cause I'm slowly going crazy?"

I shiver, his words triggering a convulsion in my own head. I didn't need that detail.

"Like, does it ever get any better than this? Than this?"

I could bullshit, I think. I could tell him that it's all going to be roses and unicorns from now on, and hey, maybe it will be. I was always the man with the plan in the Glade and he'd probably listen to me. But that could be a lie. I take a deep breath before answering him.

"I don't know." I say, because it's the truth. "I really don't know. But I hope it does. I've had less flashbacks the longer I've been in here, so I'm pretty sure that gets better. But if we don't try, Jax, then we ain't ever gonna buggin' know, are we? We've gotta make new memories, meet new people, crowd out all the total klunk with the good stuff and then we'll see. Yeah, the past bloody sucked, but we can't live there. We've gotta live in the now."

Jackson pulls back a little and turns ninety degrees to face me, pulling his knees up to his chest and wrapping his arms around them. He's thinking about it.

"Is that what you're doing?" He asks.

"Trying to," I reply. There are days when the voices are too strong. Days when I don't get out of bed, days when I can't speak to anyone because I'm too deep in my head to hear what they're saying. But there are days that aren't like that and I manage to smile at the younger boy and say. "Honestly? I'm too bloody stubborn, I can't let 'em win. WICKED. The Flare. Even if I don't think I'm strong enough, I want to be stronger than they thought I was."

"Yeah. I get that. And that's how you know you're gonna get out?"

"Oh, I'm getting out!" I laugh, looking around the blue room with its tawny armchairs and glass observation windows. "I mean, this place is nice, but I'd rather go somewhere where people in white coats can't watch me sleep, ya' know? Seven years of that's enough for anybody. I'm getting out. It's just what I do then, I guess."

Jackson looks confused, glancing down at my wristband. Lily's Dad's wristband.

"Won't you go back to Lily? And the others?" He asks, his brow furrowed.

A pang shoots through me at the million dollar question that I've asked myself a thousand times and I look over at my bedside table, where Lily's letters are tied up with a shoelace. I'm too frightened to answer them, though I read them again and again. What if it doesn't sound like me? What if she can tell? I've sent cards and photographs through Will, but I've spent all day checking them, sending them through the nurses, some other Supers as well as Will himself. Above the bedside table is a notice board, a growing collage I'm making of the photos they send me. Lily at the Christmas party in 'C' Block, juggling toddlers in her arms. Karly and Minho at a racetrack somewhere. Clint sitting on a railing with a girl I don't recognise. Lily and Charlie cradling guinea pigs - Smudge and Pippin - on the purple sofa, next to a photograph of Isla and Savannah Davenport riding a swan boat in the parks (both of whom have written me more letters than I can count). Gally and Lily at a pizza joint on Valentine's Day (there was a letter explaining that one), Lily trying to get him to pull faces for the camera. All of them sitting round a table in a café somewhere with a woman with grey hair and a spotted pinafore patting Charlie and Clint on the head - Mrs T. She sent me a lovely Christmas card. The group picture makes me think about the words stained into my neck, overlapped now with thick black blood vessels - I was the 'Glue' that held them together, but the one who fell apart. Ironic, really. The old me would have laughed.

"Newt? Won't you?" Jackson prompts, that irrational irritation that I'd heard in my own voice so many times since I got sick lacing his words.

"I...I'm not sure. Depends, I guess."

"On what? I always thought you loved her-"

"I do!" I snap, anger filling my voice for a second. "That's why it depends. If I never go back to the way I used to be, the person she loved, then maybe it's better if I go somewhere else...at least for a while. Work out how to be friends, and then come back."

Jackson nods and doesn't push it - he doesn't look convinced, but I don't want to talk about it. His gaze drifts over my shoulder and fixes on something on the wall. I crane my neck around. Our whiteboards were still on that wall - his on the left, mine on the right, reading: 'Isaac 'Newt' Newton, Green. Pacifiers - 'Lily', 'Minho', 'Alby', 'Sylvia'. Triggers - 'Thomas', 'Denver' (major), 'Maze' (minor).' I look back at Jax and he's frowning again.

"And is that part of it too?" He gestures to my board. "What's up with your thing with Thomas? With Thomas? You guys were always like that!"

Jackson links two of his fingers together and raises his eyebrows. I flinch and rub my temples with my fingertips, the Trigger making the ache in my head spike.

"Yeah." I manage after a few seconds, not wanting to shut him out but not wanting to talk either. I'm not sure how much control I have on this one. "It didn't exactly end well."

I haven't opened that door in my brain, and as soon as I put the key in the lock for Jackson, it starts to rattle, the memories, the impending flashback pushing on my consciousness. 'I bloody remember you, Tommy. I can't go completely crazy in a few days.' I grit my teeth. No. I don't want to go there. Bugger off.

"Thomas shot you, right?" Jackson probes. "But he missed - you can't be all that mad, can you?"

Agh. The edges of my vision go dark and I screw my eyes shut. No. I don't want to go back. "Just shut up, you shuck traitor! You can't do one last, lousy thing for me? Gotta be the hero, like always!" Bugger off. I can feel the shaking starting up in my fingers and I clench my fists and tell Jackson:

"It's complicated."

"Complicated? You sound like an old cliché married couple." Jackson laughs and pats my shoulder.

His laugh startles me out of my head and I open my eyes, the contrast of the comment pulling a sudden smile onto my face and I sigh. "Well, it'd make one hell of a musical."

Now I'm looking at him again, Jackson looks a bit contrite. "Are you okay to talk about it? Are you okay? Didn't really think about it being a Trigger."

I take in a breath that's only slightly shuddering as the blackness recedes for the moment and I reply, "'S not my favourite topic, bein' honest. Yeah, he shot me."

I can feel the lumpy scar through my shirt. "But it - it's not that."

My chest feels tight. I've only tried to say this to Will. It's taken me months to sort it out in my own head - why Tommy is a Trigger for me. Why his name is enough to make me sick, to catapult me back into my memories, into the grimy streets of Denver, when Lily and Minho and Alby can almost always bring me back. Jackson is watching me intently.

"It's not that he shot me. I-I asked him to - begged him actually. In a weird way, I guess I'm grateful for that. It's not even really him exactly, it's my-"

"Are you really saying 'it's not him, it's me?' Really, really?" Jackson says. The smile is tugging on his lips again.

"Shut up." I smile back, but it fades as I remember. "It's not though. Tommy didn't do anythin' that I didn't ask him to. It's me. It's me. It was me-" Pushing against the forces in my head is almost a physical effort. "I was cruel to them all, but I was a bloody monster to him. I said stuff I knew would hurt him that day, stuff I can never take back. Never. Not if I live to be a hundred."

A van. A man with a Launcher. The gun I pressed into Thomas' hands. 'I hate you! I always hated you! Gotta be the one people remember, the one people worship! We should've thrown you down the Box hole!' Lies. Nothing but evil lies dug straight from his greatest fears. 'I should rip your eyes out'.

Jackson let go of his knees and shuffled a bit closer. "That's why? Newt, you were sick. You still are sick. You can't blame yourself-"

"Now, who's a bloody cliche?" I ask and Jackson rolls his eyes and we chant together:

"Your Flare is not you. You mustn't judge your morality by your mental corrosion." The line that played on all the cringey Rehab tapes they'd played at the start - thank god they'd overhauled them lately to something that didn't make you feel six years old and ninety at the same time. We both laugh but then Jax turns to me again:

"Seriously though - that wasn't you. It wasn't. Wasn't. It was a version of you, sure, but that doesn't mean you meant it."

"But it was me. I said that stuff because I knew it would hurt him. Nobody else would know it but me. And maybe Min."

"Dude, if I heard some jerk showing off about their Louis Vuitton bag and it pissed me off, and so I told them it was really shucking ugly - even if I thought it looked great - that doesn't mean I meant it, just that I knew it'd take them down a few pegs. Just because I knew it would hurt, doesn't mean I meant it."

I can't help but smile at that and the frankness of his expression, and I say quietly. "It was a bit worse than that, Jax."

'I hated every second of every day. And it was all . . . your . . . fault !' Tommy was crying as much as I was. I was worse than a monster - how had he tried to save me after that?

"But you know what I mean, Newt. Thomas's is one clever shank - we all knew that - he'll have worked it out. That you didn't mean any of it."

Jackson's words hit something in the back of my head and I suddenly remember what Lil said to me once, back on the Berg. 'The people that matter will always know the difference.' I hope you're right, Tiger-Lily.

"Plus," Jackson adds, leaning back against the wall by the bed and spreading his hands - or trying to, until a wrist tic catches him out and slams them back together again. "Shucking, ow - it was a pretty unique situation, man. I feel like you deserve a bit of leeway - it's not every day you're standing at gunpoint asking your friend to blow your brains out."

"Or sittin' in on a private cult meeting as the No. 1 prisoner." I say. "Aren't we special?"

All it takes then is eye contact and we're hysterically laughing, laughing until the tears in our eyes are tears are fuelled by that rather than panic and regret, laughing until we're leaning on each other, until Erin - one of the nurses - sticks her head round the door to check we're okay. We flap 'yes' at her and it isn't even that funny, but, like I tell Jax when I can get a breath in:

"Bloody hell, if you don't laugh, you'd just cry, wouldn't ya'?"

"Why limit yourself?" Jackson murmurs with a grin. "I do both."

We sat together in silence for a minute, leaning against the wall, turning over the conversation, turning over the madness of the whole thing in our minds until Jackson leans into me with his shoulder and says: "Can I tell you something?"

"Sure, knock yourself out."

He shifts a little so he's still leaning against the wall, but looking at me.

"Whatever you want to say about it, I've always admired you, Newt. In the Glade, I looked up to you all the time. All the time. You were always so sure of stuff - a leader, but you still managed to be nice to shanks without biting their shucking heads off every time they asked a question. You never seemed scared-"

"First of all, I'm a terrible leader," I say, shaking my head with a slight smile. "You saw with Minho in the Scorch - I like people, I can get shanks to listen to me, but I'm too bloody emotional, when it comes down to it. Look at the last five minutes! I've cried, shouted and laughed like some kind of maniac - me normally is just that scaled down a bit. And second of all, I'm sure of absolutely buggin' nothing, Jax. I'm just really really good at pretendin'. It's all part of the 'good leader' mirage, ya' see?"

Jackson looks like he's considering it, but then he reaches out and pushes me lightly.

"You didn't let me finish, you slinthead." He says. "Don't interrupt, interrupt me when I'm complimenting. I was going to say that I still do."

I don't answer for a second, not sure how respond. I've never felt like that about myself - I've always done as much as I could, found out what needed doing and got on with the bloody thing, making sure I trampled over as few shanks as possible. I've never thought that was admirable, just necessary, just human. And I hated myself when I couldn't do that anymore. I can't show Jackson how much those few words mean, how much I can't say that to myself, so I just reach to the hand he's clasped on my shoulder and pat it firmly.

"Thank you."

"No worries. I wish I could do that though - pretend. Stay all super calm and collected. I'm bouncing off the freaking walls every five minutes over this Grade Test and nothing seems to get to you - that thing with Thomas, that's the only thing I've really seen you freak over." Jackson frowns again, his attention back on the orange band on his wrist, a reminder of the looming exam.

"Oh, there'll be plenty of time for that." I chuckle drily. "I still 'freak' often enough. Plus, you don't have to be like me - don't be, Jax, I'm a bloody mess." I'm grinning and he's shaking his head. "Hey, do you remember when we used to do Dance Classes together and we were the only guys there? And that time Mr Aleksandrov got us to do that ballet routine to Lord of the Flies?"

Jackson nods and I carry on. "And I spent hours and hours and hours in the training room, trying to get every move exactly right technically, and then you absolutely destroyed me in the exam?"

"Yeah," Jackson says. "I never understood that. You were perfect."

"No!" I lean forward, waving my arms, determined to make the point. "See, I did! I was technically perfect, and you fluffed a couple of steps, but you lived that dance, Jax. I hit every mark, my form was textbook, but I was so focused on getting everythin' perfect that my face was a total blank. You painted every emotion you had on your face and through your body and you knocked 'em dead. And that day I wanted to be like you."

Jackson looked up from his wristband, his eyes shining. Then, he shuffled a bit closer and leant his head on my shoulder - just like he used to do with Stan in the Glade - and said:

"Aww. Thanks, Newt." He yawned hugely. "Gosh. This deep stuff's exhausting, man. I've just spent all my beauty sleep in twenty minutes. This is what I mean, though - is it gonna be like this forever? Freak out and soul searching every five minutes. I'm going to have so many wrinkles by the time I'm 30. Wrinkles. So many wrinkles."

"At least we're gonna get to be bloody thirty. Didn't think I'd be twenty. But no, I actually don't think it is, ya' know? I think our heads are so full of klunk and nightmares and all the pent-up emotion we've squashed into them for months and years that we just need to get it all out. Tell another person, prove that it was real. Doesn't matter how we do it, we just need to get this stuff out of our brains."

"You know what they say - a problem shared is a problem halved!" Jax smirks.

"Oh don't!" I grimace and push him. "Stop. Pretty sure I saw that on an inspirational toilet door poster this mornin'." Jax just laughs, but I've thought of something else. "Actually...you know how I was sayin' we need to crowd out the bad stuff? Turn our minds to other things, right?"

"Mmm?" Jackson swivels his gaze up to me.

"Didn't dance class always do that for you? No matter how much the others called us sissies, you never thought about that - about anything - when you were dancing?"

"Yeah," Jackson isn't catching on. "So?"

"Why can't we start a dance class? Find one, start one - a proper one? I had a few movement workshops a while ago and they were great, but nothin' serious. It's give us something to get back into when our normal thinking brains are giving us gyp. Right?"

Jackson sits up and nods enthusiastically. "Ooh, yeah, yeah, yeah. That could be cool actually - it'd get out some of the pent-up energy shit as well. Maybe we could work people's tics into routines - give them a use for half an hour and stop them pissing people off so much."

"I really like that!" I grin. "I've got a session with Will this afternoon, I'll have a plan by then."

Suddenly, as if I've summoned him with magic words, Will sticks his head round the door.

"Ah - hey boys! You alright, Jackson? Great - page me if you want a hand, kiddo, any time." Will turns to me. "Newt, are you coming down to help settle the Newbies? We've had a ton of new people in from some villages in Hawaii and I thought you'd want to pitch in."

"Hawaii?" I ask, already scrambling off the bed and starting for the door. Now I was getting almost total control over my body, I was allowed to spend a lot of time helping out the rest of the Centre rather than going stir-crazy in my room. "Yeah, sure - they all okay?"

"As okay as they can be," Wil replies. "The Flare got there pretty late, so there's nobody really over forty, but they're all a little frightened."

"On my way." As I swing out of the door, Jackson sings after me, his voice teasing and completely opposite to the breathy panic when he woke up:

"See, Newt? You're all heart, you softie. I knew it all along!"

"Ahh, put a buggin' sock in it, Jackson!" I call back, picking up a cushion from the armchair and lobbing it at him, swinging the door shut behind me. That is obviously a step too far for tired Jax - the door hasn't been closed more than a second when a dense object bangs hard against the other side of it, making the hinges rattle. My Flare reacts before my rational brain and I hit the ground in half the time, my hands pressed over my ears - loud noises, gunshot, reflex reaction. Ow, ow, ow. When I regain control of my body a second later, Will is holding his hands out and he helps me up and I'm laughing even though my neck is spasming painfully.

"You sure you guys are getting on?" Will arches an eyebrow at me and I just nod, still laughing quietly.

"Oh yeah," I point back at the closed door and the spot where I'd curled up like an armadillo. "We're -we're working on that!"

2 1/2 MONTHS LATER

I'm walking down the main corridor with Will to the Grade Room and I haven't felt this bloody sick in weeks. The corridor looks spiffy, all done up now it's December-time - there's tinsel strung across the ceiling, little Christmas trees in the reception and the Social Room. You can see the Christmas lights of the shopping street outside the centre from the Social Room, and I could sit there for buggin' hours, watching them - I did, when they switched them on. It's all so beautiful - like the whole Centre's taken on its annual layer of magic. But, I still feel sick, however lovely I find the tinsel.

As we pass the nurses station, Erin catches my eye and breaks away from it, running over and pulling me into a hug. I hug her back, rocking a little, grateful for it. I really like Erin - a small, bouncy nurse with curly blonde hair and a sparkling smile, who's always looked after me in the Centre, come in for a coffee, psyched me up for tests and made me laugh. She pulls back and she's grinning.

"Come on, boy," She says. "You're gonna do it now - okay? I'll be sending all the good vibes your way!"

"Oh, please do." I grin back but I can feel the nerves making me jittery. "Thanks, Erin. I think I'm going to need 'em."

She makes a derisive snorting sound. "No, you're not. You can do it, Newt."

The head nurse calls Erin back over, shaking her head at the younger girl, but he's smiling too and shoots me a thumbs up. I've been here so bloody long that they all know me pretty well.

Walking down the hallway starts to feel a bit like a procession - to what, I'm not sure? Mrs Connor, the dance teacher that the centre hired a few months to teach us all, catches sight of me from the reception and frantically waves, making a telephone sign and holding it up to her ear, 'Call me'. 'Will do', I mouth back, but I can't stop or I'll be late. Mustn't keep the Senior Doctor waiting.

We're just walking past the Social Room when a shout comes from behind me.

"Hey Newton!" We stop and it's Jenna, leaning in the doorway of the room, her breathing slightly fast. She pouts at me, mock frowning. "I went to your room and Jax said you'd already gone - do you know how fast I had to run down here? Don't you dare go off there without hugging me, you total asshole."

Jenna is one of the other patients here, came in maybe a week before Jax from somewhere in Boston. I'd always got on with her, but when Jackson and I started sitting in the Social Room together, when we'd started the dance class, Jenna had become one of our group - and our weekly dance trio - and a bloody good friend.

When she's finished squeezing all the air out of my lungs, and Will says "Don't hurt him, Jenna!", she pats my face and tells me:

"Aww, the first Musketeer to face the board. Go in there and smash it, Newton. I don't want to see your face in here again, okay? Much as I adore you."

I laugh. "Yep. First Musketeer - won't be long before you're standin' here, Jen." I hug her again. "Thanks - see you on the other side!"

We have to powerwalk now we've stopped twice, which is good, in a way, because it proves I can do it - two months ago I'd have fallen over - and we arrive at the Grade Room with a few minutes to spare. I turn to Will.

"Bloody hell, I'm nervous." My hands are shaking, but, for once, it's got nothing to do with the Flare. Will grabs them in his and squeezes hard, looking me in the eyes.

"Come on, Newt. It's been a long ride, but I wouldn't've put you up for this if I didn't think it was right, okay? I'm convinced you're at zero now, I've thought that for at least a week, and I just need you to go in and show them how brilliant you really are. Show them like your family showed me last Christmas. And hey, if it all goes to hell, we'll just do it again next week. Yeah?"

"Yeah. Thanks, Will." He slaps me on the back then takes hold of my arm again, rolling my jumper up to look at the scars there, grey now rather than black. He snaps two fingers down onto the raised blood vessel on my wrist and it goes white on the impact. I count the seconds - one, two, three, four, five, six - before the ashy colour starts leaching back into it. Will nods, like that confirmed whatever he'd already been thinking.

"Yep. Those'll fade within the next two days, I reckon. They're going already."

I smile, just as the door to the Grade Room swings inwards, making my stomach writhe into sudden knots. The doctor standing there is older that some of the others, white hair taking over the black, and he's wearing a pair of thick black glasses and a reassuring smile over the clipboard he has in his hands.

"'Newt' Newton? Here for your Silver Grade Test?" He asks and I nod. "In you come then, lad. Let's get this over with."

As I go to follow him into the room, Will claps my shoulder one more time. "Good luck, my friend. Sock it to 'em."

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey guys!  
> So this story is coming to an end with only two more chapters left. Don't worry, the last two chapters are very fluffy and comforting :)  
> I am also currently (very slowly) working on another story that is a Percy Jackson/Avengers/Harry Potter crossover. That story is titled Daughter of Loki. It's very humorous and doesn't have as much angst as this story does.   
> I also changed my username which some of you may have noticed. It is now PennyJackson250 which is also my username on Wattpad.


	36. Books, Biscuits and New Beginnings

**Chapter 36 - Books, Biscuits and New Beginnings**

**LATER THAT DAY**

**LILY'S POV**

It was one of those evenings - the ones you have a lot of, but they never stop making you feel safe. Comfortable. One of those evenings where everyone's home, and - even though you aren't necessarily having a conversation - you're all together for those few hours, doing whatever, but doing it together. I was curled up at the far end of our purple sofa, a battered Dickens novel in my lap and a cup of tea sandwiched between me and the sofa arm as I desperately turned the pages, trying to find out whether the main character survived the dastardly murder attempt as the light faded and I had to badger Gally to turn the big light on from his desk in the corner. He did, with minimal grumbling, putting down what looked like profiles that he'd been comparing to a map on his tablet, his mind just about leaving the work long enough for him to ruffle my hair and steal a biscuit out of my packet.

"Oi...thank you!" I said, putting on a frown that made him chuckle before he sat back down at the desk. Gally and I had got on really well since coming to New York - our rooms were next to each other and I somehow seemed to have cracked the code for talking to him and pushed open the door for the others. He remembered - and by that point, so did I - all the time we'd spent together as kids and maybe he was grateful for that, I don't know but whatever it was meant that we'd spent a lot of time together. The fact that, aside from Olly and Charlie, we were the only people in the apartment not in some sort of relationship probably helped. Behind the stony exterior, he was clever, typically thoughtful and had a wickedly dry sense of humour and it was slightly strange that I still felt a drive to protect him - even though he was eighteen now and far bigger than me. I wanted to protect him from the storm of guilt that always seemed to be raging inside him, that had quietened down but not disappeared even now we were pushing eighteen months in New York. I wasn't sure that it ever would, but I was working on it.

Anyway, that evening, I was reading, Gally was profiling I-don't-know-who, Brenda was lolling back at the other end of the sofa with her eyes closed and her earbuds in, sneaking her bedsocked feet under my blanket, Charlie was doing homework by the window and Thomas had just got in from the lab and had disappeared into his room to change. Minho and Karly were in their rooms; Karl was drawing up a rota and - judging by the steady thuds coming from his room - Minho was working out. Clint was sitting opposite us at the kitchen table, trying out a new bandaging technique that seemed to involve him tying his arms together, grimacing every five seconds and trying to work his way out of them, when the phone rang.

Clint cast a despairing look to the phone a foot away from him and wriggled his bound hands a bit. "Can somebody get that?!" He called, holding his twisted arms up as an excuse.

"Mmm...give me a second." Gally mumbled, moving the sheets of paper over each other, barely looking up. Brenda didn't even flinch and I was starting to think she'd fallen asleep.

"I'll get it!" I uncurled myself from the warmth of my sofa nest reluctantly and scrambled over to the table as the phone kept shrilling, stumbling a bit because I hadn't stood up for two hundred pages.

"Hello?" I said, when I finally got there, Clint shooting me a grateful look.

"Hello - is that Lily? This is Jane from 'A' Block Rehab Centre."

Jane was the receptionist at A Block. I'd lost count of the phone calls that had started like this in the last twelve months, but even so, my fingers froze on the sideboard where I'd started sorting cutlery into a drawer.

"Hi Jane - yes, it's Lily. How are you?" Clint looked up from his bandages on hearing Jane's name and I saw Charlie put her pen down.

"I'm very well, thank you. I hope you're all okay - were you aware that Mr Newton took his Silver Grade Test this afternoon?"

"Er- yes, yes I knew he was taking it." Will had texted me this morning and it was all I'd thought about all day at work, finding every excuse to stand outside 'A' Block to see if I could get a clue, any idea of how he had done. For the couple of hours I'd been reading, the Test had slipped to the back of my consciousness, veiled by the world Dickens had drawn and had simmered there for a while, but at her words, everything else left my brain and I suddenly felt sick, unable to think around it.

"Brilliant. I'm just calling to let you all know that he passed it with flying colours - he's been issued with a 0% band already. Are you guys alright to pick him up on Friday?"

The phone almost fell out of my hand. I don't quite know what noise I made - caught somewhere between a a gasp, a sob and a laugh - as my other hand let the forks clatter to the table as I caught up my lizard pendant. I knew it. I knew you would. In two seconds, the last five years flew past in front of my eyes as they filled with tears and it must have shown on my face because Gally stood up from the desk and called: "Lily?" at the same time as Jane's voice echoed back across the phone lines.

"Miss Pasteur?"

I took a deep breath in, laughing in shock, laughing with the adrenaline that the sudden euphoria had forced into my veins and manage, "Could you give me two seconds, Jane?" I held the phone away from me and screamed:

"Minho! Karly! Thomas! Get in here! Quickly, get in here!" My voice caught and went high and strangled on the last word. It only took a second - our years of training an advantage here - until the other three were in the room too, everyone clustered around the dining table with frowns and worried expressions as I bounced up and down on the balls of my feet with excitement. Minho spread his hands and mouthed "What?"

I didn't answer, just picked up the phone again, putting it on speaker and said. "I'm really sorry, Jane, but would you mind saying that again, please?"

I could hear the smile in Jane's voice as she told us. "Sure thing, honey. I'm just calling to let you all know that Mr Newton took his Silver Grade Test today and passed it with flying colours. He's cured. It'd be great if you could all be there to pick him up Friday."

But the end of what Jane said was lost in the eruption of sound that exploded in the top floor kitchen of the Serralier Building as her words hit the others and everyone started screaming and talking at once.

"He's done it!" Minho shouted, the skipping rope he'd carried in abandoned on the floor for everyone to trip over, with a grin so wide he could barely contain it. "The shank's only gone and done it! Haha, yes! Shucking hell, Newt!"

Then he was laughing too, catching up Karly and spinning her around as Charlie screamed with joy and started to cry, flying at me and wrapping her arms around my waist and squeezing. Clint was jumping up and down, whooping and grinning, his hands still tied together with bandage mummification and I had to catch him with my free hand before he tripped over Min's rope and went flying. I looked around for Thomas, and realised he'd sunk to the floor and was laughing with relief, his head in his hands, barely getting his breath in as Brenda smiled next to him, clapping her hands and murmuring. "Thank God. Thank God."

Gally just wrapped an arm around my shoulders and pulled me against his chest, nodding and catching my eye with a wide smile. In the chaos, I just managed to extract my other arm from Charlie's grip and put the phone back to my ear.

"Thanks, Jane!" I gasped. "Thank you so much - we'll be there. We'll be there."

Friday - The Rehab Centre

NEWT'S POV

"Do you think it's cold in here?" I asked Jackson as he bounced around me in the Social Room of the Rehab Centre, fussing with my hair, my clothes. The grass outside the window had been sprinkled with a layer of frost the night before, and even though it was nearly lunchtime, it hadn't faded yet, catching the lights from all the Christmas decorations in the street.

"No!" Jax grinned at me. "That's the fun of central heating, Newt - it's shucking boiling in here, you're just adorably nervous."

Jax wasn't going home today, but now he was only at 10% it would only be a matter of weeks - a couple of tics, irrational emotions and headaches to give the boot to and then he'd be standing here too. He wasn't wrong either, I was nervous - that weird feeling of excitement and terror and pride and crazy happiness like someone had just taken my insides and stuck them in Frypan's blender.

"Well, I'm buzzing!" Jenna was perched on one of the sofas, looking up at me with shining eyes. "I'm so filming this. I can't wait to see these guys for real, rather than all those freaky eyes watching you from the million photos in your bedroom."

I laughed. "Neither can I. Neither can I."

I'm going to see them. In less than an hour, I'm going to see them. See her. I'd waited more than a year for this moment, almost two, and every second of the time remaining felt like it was eating into me and simultaneously sending tiny sparks flying around my body. The last time I had seen them had been in Denver, in that godawful sidestreet with the hunting pack. I barely remembered it - sometimes it played in my nightmares like a psychedelic horror film - but I'll always remember their faces. I desperately wanted to extend mine and Jax's philosophy to them: crowd out all the bad memories with the new ones and try to make it better. I needed to them to see me as I was now, though I wasn't certain it was quite who I had been. I needed that memory to fade.

Will had made sure I was okay and then disappeared to wait in Reception along with the other Supers with people leaving today. There were a few others - Cynthia, a forty-five year old mum from this neighbourhood who'd only realised she had the Flare when she went to get a vaccination a few months ago and Bert, a sixty-four year old who made fun of everybody and everything at every possible opportunity but was still one of the pets of the ward. He caught my eye from where one of the nurses was doing his tie on the sofa and stuck his tongue out at me with a teasing grin, flashing me a thumbs up. I grinned back and returned the gesture, glad that he could go home to his wife and his daughters and his grandchildren that he'd told me about so many times - the only people that he never made fun of. It was kinda weird that, when I got the Flare, other Cranks had been a threat, competition, something to be avoided unless you were strong enough and cruel enough to lead a pack. But by that day, this was a community. A group of people who'd all suffered the same thing - a thing that nobody outside could ever understand, not if they watched Flare documentaries for five thousand years - a group who all supported each other, depended on each other to pull through. From the outside, a rehabilitation centre for recovering lunatics could seem like the last place you'd ever make friends, but being allowed into the Social Room for the first time felt a bit like being adopted by forty people at once.

"So," Jenna asked, pushing me in the hip to get my attention again. "What's the plan, Newton? Are you shacking up with them now?"

"Yeah," I nodded. We'd sorted the plan through emails with Will as a go between over the last few weeks, as my percentage dropped lower and lower in single figures. "They've saved a room for me in their apartment that Will says they've cleared, so I'll go back with them. It's a lot easier than tryin' to find somewhere random in the middle of New York."

"And Lily?" Jenna's face was kind, but I didn't know how to answer at first. I looked down at the leather strap on my wrist - the one that didn't have the silver bracelet with 'Cured' embossed onto it that I'd stared at for at least half an hour - at the Flare scars curling round it that had hardened into white lines all over my body. In a way, Lil's been with me through every sodding awful thing I've ever had to do, I thought, but I didn't know what happened next. It was one of a million new unknowns in this new world that I was eighteen months behind on.

"I don't know," I said eventually, rubbing the back of my neck. "It's been nearly two years, Jen. She loved me then, but I think I was someone just a bit different then. I've changed, and she probably has too. I can't just expect us to pick up right where we left off and I don't want her to feel like I'm expectin' that, because it wouldn't be fair. I think...whatever happens romantically, we'll just have to get to know each other again, ya' know?" I spread my hands and laughed, though it was a bit forced. "Hey, maybe I won't be in love with her anymore, I don't know."

And yeah, maybe I'll wake up tomorrow morning with three buggin' heads and a pig flying round the room. Jenna looked sceptical, raising one eyebrow but Jackson broke in, skipping back from me now he'd finished messing with my hair - which I'd kept fairly short but had refused to let Jax put gel in that morning. He looked me up and down, like an artist with his finished work and nodded shortly.

"Not bad, Newt, not bad. I still think you should've worn a Christmas jumper, but hey, if you wanna be shucking boring, that's your boring call!"

"I wore one to dance yesterday. I feel like that's enough until actual Christmas rolls around." I grinned.

"Ugh, dance!" Jenna gasped, throwing herself across the sofa cushions so dramatically that some of them flop to the floor to escape. "How will I survive without you for ten hours a week?"

I laughed and reached across to pat her head while Jackson coughed, so forcefully that it sounded like he had a hairball in his throat and aggravated his neck tic, making the muscle twitch: "Ahem, Miss? Rude."

Jenna just lobbed a lone sofa cushion at his head and pulled herself into a sitting position, fixing me with a hard stare. "Seriously though," she said. "You're not allowed to ditch us, 'cause you're fancy and cured now. Even though I'm very proud of you, darling, well done."

I couldn't help but smile at her sudden sickly sweet tone, but then I gasped and clapped my hands to my heart like I was mortally wounded, making sure faux horror was all over my face.

"Never." I swore. "I'll die first. Musketeers forever. I'll call you all the time, I promise ya'."

Jackson laughed and Jenna smiled, but she wasn't looking at me anymore, her gaze focused on something over my shoulder. I was about to check that she was okay when I suddenly heard:

"N?"

I spun so quickly my newly-healed leg almost buckled. Nobody else calls me N.

And there she was.

Lily was standing in the doorway of the Social Room, with Will a couple of steps behind her, and there was a moment - only the one, mind - where she was completely still. But I remember it exactly. She was wearing dark blue jeans and a dark red cable knit jumper - her hair had grown out, deep brown curls falling way past her shoulders. On her collarbone was the tiny wooden lizard that she'd given me on my fifteenth birthday, that she'd given me in the Scorch, that I'd given back because it brought her back to me. You kept it? I missed you, I missed you, I missed you. I could feel it in every beat of my heart, in the blood that was thrumming round my ears. Lily looked just like she had on that cold morning, the first time I saw her out here. Her cheeks were flushed rosy in the cold and the tips of her ears were red. She was standing on the balls of her feet like she didn't know whether to run or to stay frozen in the doorway. And as I looked at her, as every cell willed me toward her, everything I'd tried to tell myself - that I might feel differently by now, that the intensity of my love for her might have cooled to a couple of cinders - disintegrated in that one moment and I realised how bloody stupid I'd been to even think it for a second. I missed you, I missed you, I missed you.

I love Lily. I've always loved her. I lost my memories and I remembered that I loved her. I lost my mind and I remembered that I loved her. And that was all there was, all there would ever be for me. I love her.

And then the frozen moment was gone and Lily was in my arms, holding me and I didn't know how we'd got there, who had moved, what had happened but I held her to me, trying to ignore the tears that were streaming from my eyes. I hugged her, her arms around my neck, mine around her back and I suddenly realised that every atom in my body had been just a little bit out of place for the last eighteen months, for every minute before this one, and the feeling - the relief, the straight-up joy - was unimaginable. Lily was laughing and I picked her up, easily like always - spinning her around me while she carried on laughing, her hand tracing my cheek like she had to check that I was there. She's real. She's really here. Then, all my plans went out of the window and I'm not sure who kissed who as the last two years shortened to nothing. This is it, I thought - as far as I could bloody think, her lips on mine, her fingertips dancing across my cheekbones, holding her to me to convince myself that I wasn't dreaming - and I kept thinking when Lily pulled back, her eyes shining through the tears in them. This is home.

Lily rested her fingertips either side of my face, gentle, as she whispered: "It's really you." Her amber eyes were wide and wondering. "It's really you."

I laughed softly, covering one of her hands with mine and nodded. "About time, don't'cha think?"

I pulled her back into my arms again, holding her as tightly as she held me, like I was afraid she'd disappear if I didn't and she moved her lips up to my ear and said, "Happy late birthday, N."

I grinned, keeping hold of her hands. "Thank you, thanks - bloody hell, I'd sort of forgotten that even happened. This is the best gift, Tiger-Lily."

"And you haven't even seen me yet!" Before I could turn, there were hands on my shoulders, spinning me towards their owner and Minho was slapping me on the back with so much force that I had to dig my nails into his shirt to stop myself falling.

"Min!" I didn't even bother with that and just hugged the guy - I never thought I'd miss his smart-aleck jibes and his cocky sarcasm so buggin much. I pulled back, my hands still on his shoulders. "Are you okay? How are you? Bloody hell, what've you been doin'?"

His face was grazed down the one side, the worst of it scabbed over on his jaw and Minho frowned at first, like he didn't have the slightest clue what I was going on about, but then he laughed and put his hand to his face.

"Oh, that? Er, tripped on the track. But no, dude, that's not important - what the shuck have you been doing? You did it, man!"

I grinned, running my hands through my hair. Yeah, I did. It hadn't really hit me before that second all that meant. "Guess I did - thanks to you guys!" I replied and Minho just raised an eyebrow and shook my hand again, hard.

"Yeah, yeah, yadda, yadda. It was you, man. But just letting you know, if you'd shucking died I'd never have forgiven you."

"Point taken." I smiled. Not sure I'd have forgiven myself after all that.

"Newt! Newt! My turn!" This time I turned fast enough to catch sight of Charlie launching herself at me and hold out my arms to swing her up into the air as she threw her arms around my neck and held on tight.

"Hey there, spider-monkey!" I smiled, lifting her up until she'd managed to wrangle her legs into a stable position around my waist. "You've grown!"

Charlie pouted: "Everybody says that. You haven't."

I could hear Lily laughing behind me, and turned my head, just to check where she was as I answered Charlie.

"Thank God. I'm already too bloody big for regular doorways - how are the guinea pigs, kiddo?"

And she was off. "Well, they're good, but we had a shock on Monday, Newt, because we thought Smudge was a boy guinea pig, but then Smudge got really fat and we though he was stealing Pip's food, so we watched him but he wasn't, he was just fat and Clint said that didn't make sense, so we took him to the vets and the vet said that Smudge is a she not a he, and she's pregnant, not fat, so Smudge is good, but she's full of other tiny guinea pigs. Lily says I can keep one, but we have to give the rest away because there's not enough room in the apartment for eight guinea pigs which is sad, but my teacher said she'll have one of them for her little girl - you know, Lily had to lie to my teacher today and tell her that I was sick, but I'm not sick, really I just wanted to come and see you, but I couldn't because it's 1 o'clock and school doesn't finish until 3:30!" She had to stop and take a breath at this point, but didn't let go of me, just wrapped her arms a bit tighter and leant her head on my shoulder as I chuckled and said:

"Look at you go, kid, you're a regular rebel! Hey, Karl - woah, you cut your hair!"

Karly came up behind behind Minho and held her arms out to me, smiling and showing off her rows of glittering white teeth and a brand new pixie cut with platinum highlights. I transferred Charlie over onto my hip, still hanging onto my neck - I wasn't about to admit that my arm was aching - and reached my free arm out to Karly who squeezed both of us and ruffled my hair, much to Jackson's horror.

"Good to see you, baby. This is all pretty sticking brilliant, even if you did take your sweet time about it! And yeah, sure did, I got bored." Karly told me, smirking. "So did you - he's really rocking the 'boy-next-door' thing now, hey, Lils?"

Lily was next to me again and she nodded with a sunny smile that made something in me shiver. "Yeah, he is. You look great - it suits you, N."

"Er, great." I managed, not sure how to reply, but liking that she liked it. "Funnily enough, I've had more time to cut it."

"Can I get a word in, brother?" Clint tapped me on the shoulder, with a fake-wounded expression. "Ach, well done, shank. We missed you."

"Clint! Bloody hell, how many of ya' turned up?" I laughed, so grateful, so home, that I couldn't fit it into normal speech. "Thanks - how're ya' doin', Dr Williams?"

I shook his hand and he slapped me on the back, twisting around Charlie to reach. "Pretty good, actually, pretty good. Gordon Bennett, I'd forgotten how crazy your accent was, Newt - think I just about got that." He teased. "Here's somebody else you're blanking."

Brenda ducked under his arm, still bundled up in a scarf and a thick puffa coat and grinned. "Hi Newt," she said and pulled a face at me as I shifted Charlie higher up on my hip. "I know we never really got chance to be friends or anything, but I wanted to come and say freaking good job anyway. This shit's hard, I know that much."

Damn straight. But I appreciated that and I nodded, holding out my free arm for a slightly awkward side-hug anyway and told her, earnestly: "Nah, you were a pretty great Berg mother, though. Thank you. Seriously. And - if you're up for it, I'd like to be friends with ya' now."

"Cool." And we shook on it while Charlie clapped. I was laughing and smiling and so incredibly happy, surrounded - finally - by my favourite people in the world without the fear that they should fear me, but there was somebody missing as I looked over their shoulders. There was somebody I needed to see. Reading me in a second, even after two years without the first few books, Lily tapped my shoulder softly and pointed towards the doorway.

"He's there, N."

She was right. Standing back, a few paces behind Will, Thomas was standing with his arms folded, watching us but not joining us. Another flash of nerves shot through me, my memory flashing back to the last words we'd swapped, the last things we'd exchanged - guns and bullets, verbally and literally. I gently set Charlie back onto the floor, squeezing her hand and made my way across the room towards Thomas, forcing a smile onto my face, aiming for the old, open one that had always come so easily to me but I don't know how well I managed it. When I was a couple of metres away, Thomas gave me a tight-lipped smile and a nod, his eyes anxious and the effort of keeping his face straight taking up most of his attention.

Seeing his face then - afraid, but not afraid of me - reminded me of what Will had told me a few months ago. "You've got to think about it from another angle. I've seen both angles and you've both been carrying around a lot of guilt, Newt. He feels he should have done better by you, that he owed you more" and I think that, even if Will hadn't filled me in there, I'd have read it in Tommy's face at that moment. He always was a bloody terrible liar. You don't owe me a buggin' thing, Tommy.

Not really even thinking about it, I reached up and pulled the neck of my T-Shirt to one side, so he could see the scar tissue bunched on my shoulder, twisted inwards like a collapsed flower after a few bees had been at it and ragged the edges up a bit. Just like the one above Tommy's armpit - the one I'd never forget digging the bullet out of with a red hot knife in the Scorch - and I smiled at him.

"You know, you're a bloody awful shot, Tommy?" I glanced at my matching scar and raised my eyebrows.

Thomas had one hand pressed to his lips and that made a spluttering laugh burst out around his fingers as he gasped to get the breath back in - and knowing Tommy like I do, probably the emotion too. He moved his hand away from his lips and opened his mouth, like he was going to say something, but closed it again and I could almost see him rearranging the sentence in his head. I decided to cut him off - whatever guilt he still had, I didn't want him carrying it around for my sake anymore.

"Well, you're not just gonna stand there, are ya', brother?" I took another step closer to him and opened my arms for a hug - please - and, thank God, Thomas didn't even hesitate, grabbing my hand and pulling me in and he was almost a head shorter than me, but that didn't matter 'cause it's a hug and who gives a flying damn about logistics?

"Well done, man." Thomas mutters, still gripping my hand. "I'm pretty shucking proud of you. Was that using it right, shank?"

I wasn't sure if that was a good natured dig at Minho or at me but I laughed anyway - that's our Tommy. "Yeah, that was it, Tommy. Thanks, back at ya', you know?" I gave him a long look. He looked more tired than the others did and there were still lines between his eyebrows, even though he had mirrored my smile by now.

"Bloody hell, we need to talk." I told him, the words I'd said before still spinning round my brain - and if I listened hard enough, I could hear the gunshot sometimes, usually in my dreams. We'll to have to work this bugger out together, my friend. Thomas nodded slowly, meeting my eyes with his brown ones, lighter than mine but darker than Lily's.

"Yeah." He replied, but then he clapped my shoulder and said. "But not today. Today's all good."

I'll take that. Everybody hugged, and with my off-kilter world of the last two years on its way to being realigned, I gravitated back to Lily's side, squashing between her and Minho as Will clapped his hands and moved away from his doorway spot at last - I rubbed my still smarting eyes on the back of my hand as he approached us with a grin that would have given any one of us a run for our money. When Will stopped in front of us, he started scrabbling for the right booklet in his seemingly endless paper wallet and I felt Lily's fingertips brush against the back of my hand, drawing all of my attention that hadn't been hers anyway straight into her orbit again. On yet another impulse, I reached out and laced my fingers through hers, for what was simultaneously the millionth and the first time. She looked up at me, her eyes sparkling, and smiled, squeezing my hand in hers as Will started to speak.

"Right everyone - hello, first of all!" He transferred his smile to me. "I'm pretty sure this is as much of a collision of worlds for Newt as it is for me, seeing you all in one place, but I'm damn glad to be here to see it. Now-"

Will shot me another glance, and there was something in his expression that made me suspicious. "This is the part where I embarrass you, Newt." He warned.

"Aw, no, Will - you know too much! No-"

The others laughed as Will brandished the papers in his hand at me and cut me off with a chuckle. "Ah, no, I've signed these papers - I'm just your friend now, not your Super, I can say what I want."

I groaned that he was right and shook my head, keeping my lips pressed together to hide the smile that was poking at me as he carried on, the papers still pointed towards me as a threat.

"Now, just over a year ago, you lot came to me and told me about your friend - who you told me would give it everything he had if we just gave him a chance. It took me more than an hour of wrangling and straight up begging to prise that chance out of the unforgiving clipboards of the Senior doctors-"

"Thank you." I mumured, and Will nodded.

"- and I'll tell you now that I've not spent many hours more worthwhile than that one. I didn't have a whole lot of hope then. The boy I saw later on that day was barely alive, barely conscious, barely anything at all, but the man standing with you all now - I warned you this was cheesy, kiddo - is genuinely one of the kindest, most intelligent, determined, inventive, insanely talented (excuse the pun) individuals I've ever had the privilege of calling my friend. You should all be damned proud of him, because I sure am. I can't wait to watch all the things you're going to go out into that great big world and do, Newt - and that goes for all of you actually. I'm very proud to know all of you. Just remember to drop me a line sometimes, okay?"

I was suddenly choked up again for what felt like the thousandth time in the last day or so. But I'd stopped being embarrassed about crying a bloody long time ago, and I took the papers from Will and hugged him hard.

"You saved my life. And my head. I'm sorry for being such a difficult bugger, Will. Thank you with all my heart, and thanks for putting up with me, but you ain't gettin' rid of me that easily, ya' know? I've got your number, my friend!"

Will nodded and, if I didn't know better, I'd tell you that his eyes were a little shiny too. He squeezed my arm and then pointed to the door at the far end of the room.

"Alright, kiddo. Now, go on - get the hell out of here!"

"And don't come back!" Jackson called, sticking his head around the door from the corridor and winking at me as the others waved.

This is it. This is the moment. And - in it - I looked around the high-ceilinged room with its sofas and its huge windows. There's the spot that Jenna and I first talked - I think it was about a Zhu Zhu pets or something equally bonkers - the spot where Jax and I started an impromptu dance party when he passed his Yellow Grade Test, by that window is where I finally managed to walk the length of the room without my stick, Erin at my side, until I tripped into Will's grip over by the TV stand. Over there is where I split up that fight between Reggie and Greg, and didn't get involved even though my head was screaming at me, even though I had to bite my lip so hard that it bled to force down the instinct. That beanbag is where I told Will about Thomas and where he told me about his wife's new pregnancy - and that one is where I got Lily's six page letter on my twenty-first birthday last week, the one that made me cry until one of the Orange Graded patients, Yara, came over to pat me on the head and feed me chocolate buttons. Yet another place that's made me who I am. Another chapter that I couldn't wait to finish, but now a new one was beginning, there was a bit of sadness mixed in with the hope.

"You ready, Newt?" Like always, it's Lily's voice that brings me back. "We've already got your case in the car."

I took a deep breath and looked at the roaring main road and the Christmas lights that I could see through the open door. "Yeah." I told her and I took her hand again, watching the familiar specks of gold dance through her eyes as she watched me. "Yeah, I'm ready, Lilybird. Let's get out of here."

And - after 379 days in New York's Central Flare Rehabilitation Centre, 'A' Block, getting my jacked up head and my soul and my life back together - with Lily's hand tight in mine, I let my family lead me out into our new world.

Later That Day - Mrs T's

I knew Mrs T's was going to be great as soon as we opened the door to the place and a sleek brown Cocker Spaniel collided with my legs. He clearly thought we were the best thing to enter his tiny world that day 'cause he catapulted from Minho to Lily to Karly, Clint and Charlie before springing back to me and scrabbling at my legs. New person, new person. I let go of Lily's hand for a second and immediately crouched down, scratching his ears until he rolled over on his back so I could rub his belly.

"Hello, boy!" I said. "Oh, bloody hell, you're cute."

The dog bounced straight back up and jumped on my bent knees, climbing up to lick my face.

"Brontë!" Lily nagged, trying to push him back gently, when - around the wall of chestnut fur - I heard a woman's voice and the sound of someone rushing toward us.

"Ah, my favourite hooligans! The whole gang today, is it? Don't worry, your table's free, with it being a funny time." I could just about see the woman speaking - Mrs T, I guessed - a round-faced, smiley woman with an apron and a kind expression. "Nine peppermint chocolates, as usual?" She asked, already turning away a little towards her kitchen, as if this was always the answer when Lily called:

"Actually, Mrs T, it's ten today, please, if that's alright!" Lily was smiling broadly, as were the others, and I thought this was probably a good time to get up, moving the dog - Brontë? - gently to one side and doing so.

Mrs T had frowned at first, scanning the crowd to pin down the new face, but as soon as she caught sight of me next to Lily, she gave a shriek of excitement and clapped her hands together, flapping them at Karly and Minho at the front to move out of the way.

"Well, well, well," She smiled, wagging a finger at me, like I was the bouncy dog. "Don't tell me - you must be Newt?"

"Yes!" I nodded, easily returning her smile. "I am. 'S nice to meet you, Mrs T."

At that, all the lines of her worn face creased up as she smiled even wider and turned the wagging finger on Lily.

"And after all this time, you didn't tell me, you terrible girl?!" She teased, her eyes still sparkling. Lily laughed.

"No - oh, I'm sorry. We wanted to surprise you!"

Mrs T folded her arms, her eyes still sparkling, and shook her head like she couldn't believe the cheek of today's youth.

"Well, consider me surprised, dear. Surprised and thrilled for you all." She turned back to me, unfolding her arms just as quickly. "As for you, I'm just going to have to hug you, darling, if that's okay? I'm so proud, I shall burst otherwise!"

That was so unbelievably kind from someone who had only seen me for five minutes that I didn't have any trouble obliging as the older woman bustled me into a hug and squeezed my arm, sympathy written in her expression. "Well done, dear. I've been hearing all about you for goodness knows how long - and any time up in that place, isn't easy." She said.

"Thank you," I replied, considering it. "Actually, I think bein' in there was the easiest part."

I felt Lily's fingertips at the small of my back - I'm here, like always - and a sudden warmth washed through me as I took Mrs T's hand in both of mine.

"Thank you so much for all your cards, by the way. That was real lovely of you - I had them up on the wall in my bedroom; I've still got them."

She patted my hands, bestowing another warm smile on me and said. "Nothing at all, dear, nothing at all." Then she pivoted a little and addressed all of us. "Right then, get yourself sat down, all of you, and I'll bring your drinks straight over."

Amid a chorus of 'thank you's, Mrs T hurried back into the counter and we all filed over to a huge mishmash of sofas and coffee tables in the far corner. The café was lovely, dark blue walls with autumnal colours everywhere, warm coloured sofas and candles burning in every alcove, fairy lights strung all the way above and along the serving desk, so everything seemed to glitter, and the room smelled like spices and Christmastime. As we all arranged ourselves on the sofa, me sandwiched in between Lily and Clint, Lil tilted her head towards me and said.

"This is our spot, always. Mrs T sort of adopted us when we showed up here the first time. She had posters of you up for months last year." Lily had a slightly strange expression on her face and I moved my arm around her shoulder, checking this was okay, but she leaned into me, so I assumed we were fine.

"Do you see that green sofa over by the window?" She asked. I did. "That's where I met the Davenports for the first time. When they told me where you were."

I remembered them. That was one of the only memories of real clarity I had of Denver. The family with the kind parents and the tiny girls, like little dolls, in the coats that were too big for them and not thick enough at the same time. I'd never been so relieved as when I heard they'd made it out - another group of people who had saved my life. Looking at that green sofa, then back at the white scars on my hands, it all felt kind of surreal.

"Wow." I managed. "That's crazy. Are we going to see them? One of the days?"

I knew they still lived here - Savannah had sent me a detailed drawing of their house with labels on including 'there's a ladder to the roof, so we can help you climb, if you still can't'. Lily smiled at the question, nodding, and she looked so beautiful in the warm light of the café that something in my chest squeezed tight and it took all of my concentration not to kiss her right there. We need to talk about it. I thought. No assumptions, remember?

"Do you want to? We can go this weekend, if you're up to it." She asked.

"Up to it?" I raised my eyebrows. "I'm fine, Lilby - don't worry about me, now. I'd love to."

She laughed and shook her head. "No - I just don't want to wear you out! I've seen enough people come out of the Centre to know you'll be absolutely wrecked by the time we get home tonight."

Home. That sounded good. Just then, Mrs T put her head round the corner and caught sight of Brontë curled up in the arms of Charlie the Animal Whisperer and tutted, shaking her head.

"Brontë, you cheeky beggar! Oh, well, if she asked you, I'll let you off." Charlie nodded happily, snuggling into Brontë's fur as Mrs T turned her attention to me. "Alright, Mr, can you come and help me finish these drinks?"

"You're being summoned!" Minho grinned as I jumped to my feet.

"Of course, ma'am. Just let me-" It took me a couple of seconds to extract myself from the sandwich of people on the sofa and clamber across to her. "There. At your service, ma'am."

"Alright, just pour those mixes into the mugs there, dear." Mrs T pointed to a row of striped Christmas mugs on the sideboard as she hustled me into her kitchen - which looked exactly like you'd expect: colourful crockery in every direction, oven gloves with reindeer on above a crimson Aga, two armchairs with crochet blankets and a scatter cushion each and a plush dog bed in the far corner. I set to work and she started filling me in on the eighteen months that I'd missed as she unloaded the dishwasher.

"You know, your friends have been such a help to us round here - and not least 'cause they make up half of my weekly income!" Mrs T told me with a grin. "Always on hand if we've had a disaster with the electrics or the decoration, or if we're suddenly overrun by ravenous commuters - it happens more often than you'd think!"

I cupped my free hand around the pouring jug, careful not to spill anything on her terracotta tiles. "You know, you can count me straight in there, Mrs T - if you ever need anythin', I'll be straight down here."

"Well, I can see that, dear," Mrs T laughed, gesturing to the jugs. "I've already put you to work and not a peep of complaining from you!"

"Wouldn't dream of it." I smiled and Mrs T clapped a hand over her heart and cried:

"You're a good boy - if I've said it to your friends once, I've said it a thousand times, thank goodness there were no boys like you lot when I was a girl! You're all far too pretty for your own good!"

I laughed and Mrs T passed me a long handled spoon next. "Just swirl those around a bit, so the mixes don't separate - all the same, do you know anything about what those kids have been doing while you've been gone, sweetheart?"

I sort of appreciated that she made it sound like I'd popped out to the corner shop rather than spending four months raving in Denver and another twelve in a recovery ward. I shook my head and replied:

"Only some of it: what I've seen on the news - which, actually, tells me something about how buggin' amazing they've been - and what Will's told me. Will's my Super-"

"Oh, I know Will!" Mrs T smiled at me. "He comes in here Mondays and Thursdays for a tea cake and a coffee. How's his wife?"

"Good, I think!" I said, surprised. "They're going for a scan on Saturday, he said."

She clapped her hands before pulling her oven gloves on to pull a rack of biscuits out of her Aga. "Lovely - they're a lovely family. Anyway, your friends, dear, you wouldn't believe all the things they've been up to - and that's if you ignore all the madness in Peru, which is incredible on its own - they've been all over the place with the refugee centres, building the shelters, doing the first aid and the research for them. Then there's all the stuff they've had to do on the telly and with the government people over that awful, awful WICKED business-" Mrs T's expression darkened for the first time with what looked like anger. "If I could have done that for them, I would have done. None of you should have to go back to that, you've done enough under that name."

She clattered the biscuits onto a tray with some violence, but then she shook her head and moved on. "And then there's their charity for missing people - that's called Lizard, now, but they've done ever so well with it. The number of people I've had crying on my sofas because your friends have found their family, you wouldn't believe. Did you know, dear, they called it 'Looking for Newt' at first? They were only trying to find you."

I had seen that. I'd seen videos of the speeches they'd made, of all the adverts they'd put out when they first got to New York. They'd saved me - another piece of the puzzle - and I didn't know how to even start paying them back for it. Hearing about the things the others had done made a strange mix of feelings start up in me - one one hand (and the much stronger feeling) I was so proud of them that it made my chest ache, knowing they'd done what WICKED had never come close to, that they'd spent the start of their new lives helping other people when they could so easily have taken their compensation money and buggered off out of society. But then there was the niggling, sad feeling that I squashed as much as I could that it was a whole world of experiences that I'd missed, things they'd shared that I can never understand. But you're alive - so what does all that matter?

"Yes, I did!" I told her, spinning the hot chocolate of the seventh drink around with the spoon. "Only when I was a bit better - but I owe them my life, about ten buggin' times over."

Mrs T nodded. "My gosh, they were so worried about you. They'd walk all the way out to Queens just to put those posters up, to stop people, to go round the camps. You wouldn't believe the number of people who told them to give it up, but they just wouldn't do it. They were so angry sometimes, but they were going to find you. Even if it took them years."

I nodded, blinking quickly and turned back to the mugs, not wanting to cry again - I'd done enough of that up at 'A' Block. Mrs T looked at me out of the corner of her eye and then hustled over, rubbing my shoulder with a kind expression as shrieks of laughter came from the main café followed by frantic barking.

"You've got some real friends there, sweetheart."

I coughed. "They're my family. They're everything, really."

Mrs T smiled. "I'm glad to hear it, dear. Goodness knows you kids need one."

She patted my shoulder again and then opened a drawer, handing me a silver canister. "Now, young man, this is the real privilege, alright?'

"Right?" I flashed her an apprehensive glance that made her chuckle.

"Don't look so worried, Newt, it's only whipped cream - just swirl it round the mugs a bit and press that button there."

I followed her instructions, pointing the can at the first mug with confidence enough, but I totally misjudged the whole force and distance thing and the cream came shooting out of the can so quickly that a mini-wave of liquid chocolate crashed over the mug and over the sideboard.

"Whoops!" Mrs T cried, laughing and handing me a wad of paper towels.

"Oh, bloody hell, sorry!" I picked up the offending mug and tried to absorb as much of the chocolate off the table as I could.

"It does take some practice, dear. Here, look, give me your hand." Mrs T guided my hand around so the cream fell in tiny swirled mountains in the cups.

"You should have seen me a few months ago," I said with a wry smile. "One wrist tic and I'd have had that on the ceiling."

Mrs T shook her head and patted my wrist as an alarm went off near the Aga and she hurried over to take the next rack of biscuits out. The kitchen was silent for a couple of seconds and she shuffled the biscuits around on the plate and I tried to get my whipped cream swirls to look even slightly like hers - but it was only a few seconds before she asked me, somewhat nonchalantly:

"And what about our Lily? She's an absolute darling. I'll never forget the day she came in here after seeing you up at the General Hospital. The poor girl looked shattered - it was just after she'd broken her wrist, so her arm was all strapped against her chest, her hair looked like she'd been dragged through a hedge, her eyes were red and she must have been awake for something like thirty-five hours with two hours sleep, poor angel looked like she'd been though a crusade. But you looked at her, and you just knew she'd won that war. Her eyes were so bright and all she could say was 'they've given him a chance. That's all he needs'."

All I could do was nod, biting my lip and taking the cinnamon duster from Mrs T's outstretched hand. "I love you, N. And don't you dare contradict me." I could see it in my mind, the bowling alley, smoke tinged amber by the fires glowing where the pins should have been. Mrs T shot me another look that was almost knowing over her shoulder.

"She's works so hard, you know. Too hard, between the charity and the volunteering and those kids up at the Centre - I need you to take my side, dear, and get her to slow down before she spins off the axis!" Mrs T tutted. "And she's always fussing after the rest of them, mothering them - making sure Charlie's picked up from school, that's someone's fed those guinea pigs, and Gally's not having a spiral and that everybody's eaten and slept and been hugged that day. Lily's a special girl. She's got a big heart."

"I love her." I admitted. There. I'd said it out loud again, whether she loved me now or not - it wouldn't change anything. I looked round nervously at Mrs T to see how she took the declaration that she hadn't asked for, but to my surprise, she was laughing as she put down the tray she'd been juggling.

"Oh, sweetheart, you don't need to tell me that." She shook her head at me with a chuckle, and patted my shoulder again, moving to put the mugs on trays by the kitchen door. "I'm as old as the hills, dear, I've seen enough boys in love. I know that look when I see it - when did you take your eyes off her back in there? She's got you on a string, and for jolly good reason."

Well, she isn't wrong. And I smiled in spite of myself. That phrase about string had never sounded that complimentary to me before, but now I considered it, I kinda liked it. There did seem to be something - string or memories or something that we'd never understand - between Lily and me. Something that brought us back together, even when I'd have rather been apart. Even if she didn't love me - the way that I loved her, anyway - I knew somehow that we'd never be strangers to each other. Mrs T left me to my musing as we put everything on the trays, though I got the sense she was considering me too and had a pretty good idea of what was playing in my head. As soon as we'd got everything balanced she went to pick up the trays, but I darted forward.

"Don't worry with that, I'll carry 'em in, Mrs T." I offered. "I need the practice balancin' stuff."

Mrs T stepped back and let me take the trays, her expression warm. "Alright, then, I'll follow with the biscuits. I think I've got the measure of you, dear." Then she winked at me and waved me out of the door.

We'd been in the kitchen at least a quarter of an hour, and it took me half a minute to get the drinks down into the tables and clamber over five pairs of legs to squash back into my spot, by which time, the conversation - or should I say, the debate - was in full swing.

"No, no, no, dude." Minho was waving his arms at Clint. "I'm sorry, there's no shucking way that 'Good King Wenceslas' is the best carol. Since when has 'Good King Wenceslas' been anywhere even freaking close to the best carol? All he does it 'look out' and go 'oh look, people, snow in Winter'! There's not even any Christmas in it!"

Clint looked unreasonably exasperated for a Christmas carol. "No, you just haven't listened to it! There might not be any Christmas literally, but the whole story is full of the spirit of Christmas - a good king leading a needy beggar through the storm and giving him food and shelter. It's got a much better message than shucking 'Jingle Bells'."

Thomas had his head in his hands across the table. "I cannot believe we're having this conversation." He groaned and lifted his head to look at me as Minho and Clint stared daggers at each other. "Welcome back, Newt." He raised an eyebrow at me like maybe coming back into this madness was my mistake.

Before I could answer, Mrs T started sliding drinks down the table to people like a pro and then tapped Lily on the shoulder and pointed at me with a conspiratorial grin.

"He's allowed, dear." She told her, flashing me a look of approval before disappearing back into the kitchen.

My bafflement must have shown on my face because the others all started to laugh. "Right there," Minho told me. "You just passed the most important test of the week. Forget that other one you did - what was it called again?"

"Nah, I don't remember, man. Can't have been important." I shot back and Min grinned, leaning across the table to slap my arm.

"Seriously - proud of you, though. We missed you, brother. 'S good to have you back."

I smiled and slapped his hand right back. "Thanks. I can't even tell ya' how good it is to be here."

Our group had grown in numbers since we'd arrived at Mrs T's. Waiting for us at the café had been Olly Goldsmith - who'd shaped up into a real nice-looking lad with thick curly hair, horn-rimmed glasses and a satchel full of classic novels. I knew he'd survived WICKED's Cut, thank God, Lily's letters had filled me in, and before long Olly had started writing to Jackson, and Jax - unlike me - had written back, so it wasn't only curiosity for myself that made me real interested to meet the guy. He seemed pretty friendly, coming straight over to shake my hand and introduce himself and ask me how Jax was doing - I told him I didn't think it'd be long before we could give him a similar kind of reception - and meeting him for a second time had been a pleasure more than anything. But the real surprise had been the boy with him - Gally. Gally who I hadn't seen since Tommy tried to tear him to pieces on the floor of the Maze - of course, I'd heard the truth of that story too and I couldn't exactly bring myself to blame the guy, but that didn't make seeing Gally again any less disconcerting. That beginning had been a touch more awkward.

"Hi Gally," I'd said, giving him a smile that must have come across a little stilted. "How're you doing? I didn't know we were seein' you down here - not that I ain't right glad to."

He'd given me a tight-lipped smile cut into a tight expression as he shook my hand. "Hey Newt...I'm good. Just wanted to come down and tell you 'good job'. 'S not any easy shit." Gally had seemed awkward, twisting his fingers and, now that I had my old memories of the boy before the Glade, the whole thing had seemed even weirder and I had replied:

"Er, no. It wasn't. Thanks." I'd rubbed the back of my neck. "Look, Gally...how about a clean slate, yeah? New city, new life and all that stuff?"

He had glanced up, like he was surprised and then given me a long, steady look, grasping my hand again. "Alright," Gally had said, his smile seeming more genuine that time. "Hey, I'm sorry for slamming a board into your head."

My fingers had flown to the lumpy scar above the base of my skull. "It healed." I told him, waving it off. "I'm sorry for being' a bloody slinthead to ya' sometimes."

Gally had shrugged. "I deserved it."

"Not always."

And we'd shaken on a truce, which felt better until both of us could manage an explanation to the other.

But anyway, back in the café, it was Olly that leaned forward to speak next, looking at me.

"Right then, Newt," He said, cradling his hot chocolate between his palms like a handwarmer. "This is your first Café Club meeting, therefore, you get to choose the topic of conversation and -" Olly shot a teasing look at Clint and Minho. "-contrary to popular belief, it does not have to centre on the moral benefits of Good King Wenceslas or contemporary colleagues."

"Oh good." I smiled. "I'm not sure I know the words past the first verse."

I shuffled back a little on the sofa, moving closer to Lily so I could see everyone better, and Lily shifted a bit so my arm fell around her shoulder again.

"First of all, I wanna hear everything!" I cried, gesticulating with my free hand. "I can't believe you guys haven't mentioned it yet, but you solved the buggin' Flare! I've never been so proud to know ya', and I think you're all shucking brilliant, but how the bloody hell did you even start with that one?"

Thomas barked a short laugh and answered. "That's a bit longer than a 'first of all', Newt."

"And we had a little help." Lily added softly, and I saw her gaze flick down to her Dad's leather wristband that I was still wearing. Oh, love. My stomach dropped in remembrance - I knew what had happened to Jeremy Serralier. I wish I had been there, for her and for him. I wasn't the only one that caught the slight sad undertone in Lily's voice and Charlie broke in.

"Thomas is right - it's long, and some of it's boring because we just sat in an office and some of it's sad. Let's not talk about that today." Charlie snuggled Brontë up to her nose again and he twisted around and licked her face with a pink tongue that seemed far too long for his jaw. The suggestion was clear in her voice, so I obliged and turned to her instead.

"And what're ya' suggesting, little lady?"

Charlie lowered the dog for a second so she could smile, then frown fiercely, then smile at me again.

"I'm still not little, Newt. But, Christmas! There's less than ten days to go - we're in single figures!"

"Alright," Charlie makes it very easy to give into her, and I'm a sucker for it. This time was no exception. "What does Christmas look like, here in the Serralier Building?"

"Well, we start off with advent calendars - we got you one, but you've got a lot of doors to open - then we go and get a tree, but we messed that up because Thomas didn't measure the door right, so Clint had to chop off the top of the tree with a saw and make a new top." She shot an accusing glance at Thomas, who put his hands up in the air.

"Guilty," He admitted as Charlie carried on, caught up in the magic of it.

"Then we decorate it and dance to Christmas music - we've already decorated it, but you can still dance - and at school, I had a Christmas concert and I got to sing the first part in 'Once In Royal David's City', which is the best carol by the way-" Sharp glance at Minho and Clint who both grinned. "- and Karly has a video of it, don't you?"

Karly nodded from the other side of Minho and said. "Sure thing, girl. We'll show Newt when we get home."

"I can't wait to hear it, Charl." I told her and she beamed. That had to have been a big thing for the usually nervous little girl who'd fallen asleep in my lap back at WICKED. "What else do you do?"

"We baked cookies and took some round to people we knew, even though Gally burnt some and they were all black."

"Did he?" I swivelled my attention to the accused, who had a long suffering expression on his face.

"Gally burnt one tray." Gally said, with an affectionate glance at Charlie. "There were at least ten."

"Still," Charlie replied. "And will we go and see the Christmas light show again, Lily? In the big park, with all the light up pandas and tunnels and things? And we'll go to the camps on Christmas Eve and sing the carols with them?"

"Yes," Lily replied, looking up at me and smiling. "You'll love those, N. The light show reminded me of the fireworks."

There were confused looks from the others round the room, but I knew exactly what she meant. I moved my hand from the table and rested it on top of hers for a second, not sure whether to take it, but the memory was too strong not to.

"Sounds perfect." I told her, patting her hand and then taking a sip of hot chocolate as Charlie started talking again and everyone else was just happy to listen.

"When we got back last year, we left milk and mince pies out for Santa - but I know Minho ate them because I'm not six."

Minho just laughed and cried: "Hey, hey, gotta check they're safe, right? Don't wanna be the house that poisons Santa, do we now? That's gotta be bad karma for a lifetime!"

And that was how it went, as the sun lowered outside and the Christmas lights flickered on in the street, casting green, red, blue lights in through the windows - everybody laughing and teasing and enthusing about Christmas and everything it meant. I realised, sitting back and watching the lights glimmer, that this was my first Christmas since I was seventeen - the first real Christmas since I was eleven. My first Christmas in a decade. And that could sound sad, I 'spect, if you wanna take it that way, but there was something magical about it too. Something hopeful. And as I sat there, listening and laughing with my family in the warmth of the café with fairy lights glittering overhead and what has to be the best hot chocolate I've ever had in my life - if elves drink anything, this is what they drink - as I watched the people in the street going by with their woolly hats and puffy coats, I was the happiest I'd been for a long long time. I was home. I said once, back at WICKED, that I thought the Earth would pull through all of this damage and madness. But now, I was finally certain that - battered, brave and hopeful - we would manage it too.

The Next Evening

LILY'S POV.

It was snowing. I remember. The rays from the Christmas lights that were strung across the street lit the snow already on the ground with red and gold lines as Newt and I wandered down a quiet street as the shops were closing, moving back towards the apartment but - without having to say it - taking the long way home. The last day and a half had been simultaneously incredible and exhausting. As I thought they probably would, the chaos of the day, the barrage of new experiences and the new surroundings meant that N - much to his embarrassment - woke up shouting at about three this morning, lost in a flashback that took minutes to dissolve. Within about ten minutes, he was fine again, but he shook so much that he'd spent the rest of the night in my room instead.

Today hadn't been any less chaotic - we slept late, read through all the information Will had given Newt up at the Centre and then, after a mega trip to the local supermarket, got enough food together for a picnic over by the lakes where we'd spent most of the day, riding swan boats with varying levels of success and just trying to fill in the last eighteen months for Newt and vice versa, and it had been lovely, but Newt and I hadn't had more than ten minutes alone where one or both of us wasn't fast asleep. So when I'd suggested we walk back while the others took the bus, and he'd jumped.

Right now, Newt was wearing a huge coat we'd had to source from the supermarket - because Min's spare definitely wouldn't fit - and one of Clint's dark green beanie hats, but the snow was still catching in his hair as we walked down the glowing street.

"Bloody hell..." He breathed, his eyes wide and shining like a kid's as we walked past one of the theatres, decked out with rows and rows of white lights shaped like tiny stars. "This is so beautiful, Lily."

His gaze wandered up and down the street, catching on the couples under arches and the people still left on the sidewalks, some on phones, some sitting on the benches, the dad lifting up his tiny son to see the bird's nest in a nearby tree, and he was smiling that crooked smile that was so familiar and so intrinsically Newt that I felt something squeeze in my chest just looking at him.

"I so wanted to show you it," I said, quietly. "It kept me going."

His gaze flew back to my face and he answered. "It's beautiful...I could see a street a bit like this from the Social Room in 'A', and I'd spend buggin' hours just looking at it, dreaming what it must look like from down there." Newt shook his head and stretched his arms out to the street we were standing on. "But you can't dream this, ya' know? There's too many senses in it - ah, that doesn't make any bloody sense-"

"No, it does!" I told him. "I know just what you mean...there's memories wrapped up in it, and you can't dream those."

I pointed at a sandwich shop with a high step down onto the sidewalk. "That was where Thomas slipped over on the ice last year. He was fine - if you're not counting his ego - but Min's never let him forget it. It was one of those things that you see happen in slow motion and you can't stop in time."

Newt huffed a laugh, and it was so cold that I could see the laugh as it burst out of him, dissolving into the snow-spangled air under the warm glow of the technicolor lights. I spun towards a juice bar over the street.

"And that one there's where we took Charlie when she got good grades in her finals. It was absolutely boiling in there and she had so many chocolate milkshakes, she was bouncing off the walls for hours. The lady who runs that shop on the corner - do you see it? - her son went missing somewhere in Tulsa, before they moved here. Rob's team found him a few weeks before he found you. He's training as a teacher now, I think? Then, that's the hostel that we lived in for a couple months before we sorted out the money and the move to the apartment - it was alright, but the rooms were freezing - what?"

Newt was looking at me intently, a slight smile on his face. "Nothin'. I'm enjoying the puzzle pieces, ya' know?" He spun around once, taking in every nook of the street, every place I'd pointed out then looked back to me. "And I guess I'm looking forward to findin' out where I fit into 'em, along with you all. Like, which corners will there be stories about me on." He paused, cautiously. "About us?"

I liked that. Rather than trying to answer, I reached across and laced my fingers with his - they were warmer than mine and Newt forced an exaggerated shiver, with a grin, but he held tight to my hand, swinging it a little as we carried on wandering, the warmth from his hand spreading up my arm. There were tens of things on every street corner that I could have regaled him with, stories that would make him laugh and make him remember, but there were too many of them crowding for my attention and after a couple of steps, I said:

"I've got so much to tell you! It's like I've been saving all this stuff up in my head for months and months, everything wonderful little thing I want you to know about - like the cat that lives below us, or the birds nesting on the roof opposite or the snuffle the guineas do when they're happy - that now I can say it, I can't get any of it out fast enough."

Newt nodded vigorously. "Me too. I did the exact same, Lil," He replied. "And I don't even know how to start it all, there's so buggin' much!"

In a way, it had always felt a bit like that with Newt after the Maze. I didn't think I'd ever run out of things to say to him, but it always felt like we were living on borrowed time and that everything we didn't get out would be lost in the space that was doomed to fall between us, and maybe we'd got into a habit. But it was different now, I told myself - and then told him, squeezing his hand.

"But it's okay," I said. "It's okay - we've got time...however much we need."

Newt gave me another one of those long looks, a gold speck dancing in one of his brown eyes, then he tugged on my hand and pulled me into a hug, wrapping his arms around my back as I slipped mine around his waist, holding tight. It was cold but that sent sparks of warmth through the whole of my body, and I wondered again what he made of all this. Of me. Yes, he'd kissed me back at the Rehab Centre, but was that really what he wanted? I knew how I felt, but what if that had all changed for him? Eighteen months is a long time when you were only together for two.

"Time," He murmured as he hugged me. "Funny how that's always had a buggin' price before. Seems weird to suddenly get a lifetime supply all at once. But - sounds good, right?"

"Mmmhmm. It's about time, like you said." I replied. Newt shifted a little, gently kissing the top of my head, like he always had, and I made a decision. Pulling back, I asked. "Do you want to sit in the parks for while, N - you can see the sunset from the hilltop?"

"Sure," He nodded, straightening my bobble hat and then pointing off down the road. "Lead the way, ma'am."

It's probably a good thing that I knew the route through the parks like the back of my hand because I couldn't stop looking at Newt. Every little thing seemed to delight him - the man playing guitar on the corner, the tiny dogs that pulled their owner across the sidewalk to see us, the shop that had a moving Santa on their roof - and he laughed and dragged me here and there across the streets to look at everything and it took us four times what it would normally to take me to reach the park, but I barely even noticed. As I watched him smile at the people who walked past us, laugh at the flickering posters outside the old theatre, dance around as the snow caught in his hair, on his eyelashes, I saw flash after flash of the boy I'd met on the rattling train almost seven years ago. I'd always been frightened - we all had - that the boy we met from the Rehab Centre would be somebody we didn't quite recognise. And he was different. All of us were. He was older - not just in years - and there was something about the way he carried himself now, a quiet confidence that I hadn't seen since before the Maze. It was a strange feeling, but one that made tears prick at my eyes that night, to see the lightbulb blaze back on.

When we finally made it into the park, through the old metal gate at the top of the hill, I lead N over to the bench that overlooks the rest of the gardens and sat down, pulling my knees up to my chest. He sat down too, angling himself towards me and stretching one arm out along the back of the bench. By now, the sun was low in the sky and the sky was orange, pink, purple and blue with indigo just starting to fade in on the horizon. There were a couple of dog-walkers standing talking and bundled-up families with small children stretched out on blankets waiting for the stars to appear. As we watched the world moving around us, I was twisting my lizard pendant between my fingers, trying to put a sentence together that could even begin the conversation I really wanted to have, when N suddenly did it for me.

"Are those moss roses?" He asked, pointing to a flower bed, where there were no petalled heads left as winter danced through the park, but the distinctive, almost star-shaped leaves still filled the bed. The jam jar on the Berg with the single yellow rose appeared in the forefront of my mind, the flower that had stayed in bloom until we finally reached Peru.

"Usually," I replied. "They will be as soon as spring comes round."

"Aren't they all the time?" Newt smiled wryly, absentmindedly tracing a raised scar that twisted from his index finger down to his wrist, and I knew he wasn't talking about moss roses. "You just can't see the flowers on 'em now, but they're still roses, right?"

I nodded, reaching out to the hand he'd left closest to me and tracing the scars there myself. Newt watched me, like he wasn't sure what I was doing but he wasn't going to move my fingers, as I told him, "Yes. And the flowers come back, you see?"

Newt grinned and twisted his wrist around so quickly that I didn't have time to move my fingers and he caught my hand in his. "I see, Lilybird." He said quietly. "I didn't. But I see now."

"Newt?" I couldn't dance around it anymore. We'd never spoken in riddles.

"Yes?" He looked up, with some surprise, at the tone in my voice.

"What are you feeling?"

The confusion didn't clear at the question, a tiny frown creasing his forehead. "Er, I'm fine. How am I feeling, in general? Or-"

"No - no, not like that. I just mean- I just-" It had never been me stumbling before. "I love you, you see. I love you, despite, throughout, because of, everything that's happened, everything I know, everything you are. I love you, and there's no - no obligation attached, you don't have to say you love me just because I've said it. I never mentioned in letters, in anything, because I didn't want there to be any expectations - that wouldn't have been fair to either of us, in case something had changed, in case we felt differently now. And I do. But not in the way you're thinking. I love you, so I was just wondering...where your head was."

It's funny how difficult feelings are a bit like a dam. You can build it up and build it up and it's the strongest thing in the world and not even a raindrop escapes you, but the second you open a door, all the pressure narrows to one point and pours out at maximum velocity in every direction. Please say something. I don't care what it is.

I'd barely let myself focus on Newt when I was talking, looking at him, but not letting myself process it in case everything I needed to say froze in my throat like the layer of snow dusting the grass. Now I looked at him, the frown had vanished, but his eyes were wide as he studied me, his hand still holding mine. He opened his mouth and closed it more than once, almost laughing and looking away before trying again, as if he'd been waiting for the right words to appear too.

"But-" He managed, pulling his fingers back and holding both hands out to me, turning them over so I could see the thick pale scars that twisted across his skin. "You could- I'm messed up, Lil. My whole body looks like that - bloody hell, sometimes, I think the inside of my head looks like that. You- you could do so much easier than me, love."

Newt turned my face to his with a gentle fingertip, so I could see his expression, his eyes earnest, but I couldn't hear that.

"Who says I want easy, N? When have we ever done 'easy'? You've never been easy and neither have I. We're all messed up, Newt. I can't pretend to know everything you've felt or even try to compare it, but when we first moved here, I woke up screaming almost every night - and sometimes I hear Winston talking, or Rachel or Alby or Dad, when I'm making coffee or walking home or on the bus and they stay there the whole day. Who is 'normal' anymore?" I took the hands he was holding out to me and lowered them to the bench.

"We've led strange lives. I think maybe we always will - be just a little bit outside the norm, but I don't mind that. I'm happy just getting a whole life, you know? Don't you think we owe it to them to live it? Your scars - the Flare - that doesn't make me love you less. I've told you before, I'm not scared of you, Newton." I arched an eyebrow and bared my teeth at him and he finally laughed. "If anything, I love you more than I did back then or even a week ago. It's cheesy as hell, but that's what's changed. You've been to hell and back and I've seen people that's broken. But not you. You're still you, whatever you think. N?"

Without words, Newt reached out and gently pushed my knees down, eliminating the barrier between us. Something inside me flipped over as he moved closer on the bench, and pulled me into him and brought my lips up to his, giving me my answer. There. His fingertips were light on my jaw - yet another first kiss - and I wound my fingers into his hair at the base of his skull, the only place not covered by the thick wool of Clint's hat. That sense pulled at me again as his lips moved against mine, the feeling that had come over me on the roof at WICKED the very first time - they'd thrown us together as nothing more than lab rats in a series of social experiments, disposable, replaceable, but in doing so, they'd created connections that nothing left in this bruised world could destroy. There was nothing more right for me than this, than him. And I'd known that for almost seven years of my relatively short life. This was it. This had always been it.

Eventually, when I gathered the will to pull back in his arms, I murmured. "That's not fair, Newton. No cheating - answer me."

He could hear the smile in my voice even before he tilted my chin back up.

"I was tryin' to show ya'," Newt laughed quietly, and rather than giving me what I wanted, he leaned back on the bench, keeping one arm around my shoulders. He tilted his head back and looked at the sky again, at the indigo stripe streaking larger across the sky, the stars surfacing in it and said: "Why do we always seem to have these deep conversations sittin' in the dark? Is it that bad that we can't talk about the truth in the daylight? I mean, I knew we were screwed up, but I didn't know it was that bad."

"I can say the whole thing to you again in the morning, if you want. My memory's great."

Newt shook his head and tapped his forehead with a fingertip. "'S okay, Lilybird. I've remembered my favourite parts." I went to push him, but he grabbed my hand and his face took on that same earnest expression. "No, seriously, Lily. All joking aside, now. I love you too." He said, pressing my fingers to his lips, just like I had with his in Denver. "I mean it. I never stopped. That kept me alive - I mean, you all did - but what you said to me, I just felt this drive that I couldn't prove you wrong. I needed your faith in me, ya' know? In the Centre, seein' you out of that window was the best part of my day. I counted down the minutes until those thirty seconds, every bloody day."

So did I, I thought, not interrupting him. So did I.

"When I knew I'd be getting out, I knew I had to give ya' some space - well, you can see how well I managed that - but I wanted to let you decide it, ya' know? The second I saw you out of that window I knew there was never any hope of me existin' in a world where I don't love you. That's clearly not how it's ever gonna be for me. But I needed you to tell me. I didn't want to push - hell, I didn't know whether ya' had some devilishly handsome doctor with a fancy degree and a mansion by now, or a tall, dark government official or - ow, kidding!"

I rolled my eyes and pushed Newt back against the bench armrest, before kissing him quickly. This is mad, I thought. We'd spent eighteen months as separate as if we'd been on separate continents - for some those we had - but now, I couldn't stop touching him, like I'd wake up or he'd vanish again, nothing more than a spirit in the snow, if I couldn't hold onto him.

"There's no doctor." I promised, twining my fingers back through his and leaning my head on his shoulder. "Just you."

A tiny child in a pink bobble hat went skipping in front of us, chasing a multicoloured ball that flashed ten different colours in half as many seconds, the ball moving just a little too fast to fall into her grasp. When she did eventually pounce on it, like a cat with a piece of string, she hugged it to her chest and immediately threw herself down the slope of the hill, gambolling over and over, picking up speed until she collided with the legs of a man carrying a unicorn rucksack at the bottom who swung the tiny girl up onto his shoulders, her shrieks of laughter echoing through the coming twilight of the park. Somewhere over by the pond, there was a dog splashing around in the middle the ornamental lilies, trying to manoeuvre a stick longer than his whole body to his owner at the water's edge - she had her phone out, video calling someone to show them his wriggles of frustration and their voices and coos to the dog floated back to us on the bench as we watched, a sense of contentment settling like the snow on the rooftops opposite.

"You know," Newt said, after a while, his expression wondering. "Mrs T said something to me yesterday...and I think we're always going to find our way back to each other. Me and you, I mean. It's not like I have tried to lose you guys enough times!" He laughed with a wry smile, but then shifted a little, looking for my opinion in my face and glancing back down at my hand in his. "Really, though, Lil. It's an inevitable, right?"

God, I love you. His eyes were warm and I knew exactly what he meant. After all, I'd heard it from almost every overly-sympathetic government official in the country - hadn't the odds been so completely against us in every single thing we'd tried to do in the last two years that we shouldn't even have been able to see over them, forget win? And yet, here we were. I looked back at N and smiled, turning my father's leather wristband around on his wrist.

"I really hope so."

Newt leaned over then and kissed me again, the brush of his lips a soft contrast to his freezing fingertips on my cheeks.

"No more hoping, love. Let's make it one."

So, there we were. Two city kids in a brand new city in a brand new world, watching as the technicolor sky faded into starlight, and we were fourteen, fifteen, seventeen, twenty, twenty-one under the constellations. Nothing was certain, because life isn't certain. There are no perfect endings, where everything just clicks, every loose end tied up like in the books I used to read, curled in my faded window seat. I knew how much was still unsaid, how much we still had to learn - about each other, about N's Flare, about our place in the world that had been thrown open to us with its million possibilities. There would still be minds to save, people to find, nightmares to war with, bills to pay when we woke up in the morning. But there would be reunions, and new beginnings and rescues and discoveries and magical things and people to love right there too. And that night it felt perfect, and - finally, finally - so much more than a chance. I'll take it - this flawed and beautiful world with all of our possible endings - I'll take it.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Stay tuned for the epilogue!


	37. Epilogue

**NINE YEARS LATER**

There are two little boys playing on the front lawn of their house. They're no more than five years old, gambolling wildly around each other, brandishing wooden swords in a fierce duel. The crack of the swords and their gleeful cries of gallantry fill the summer evening air.

"You can't come in, evil person!"

"Why? We need to work together, or Darth Maul will invade your city! I'm a Jedi!"

Crack, thud, shrieks of laughter as they circle the grass, clashing swords.

"Because I am the guard of Tatooine and I say no!"

"Well then...I shall have to fight you to the death!

At this point, the guard of Tatooine looks like he might be regretting his earlier decision, but grits his teeth and stands his ground to defend his life against the dark (bath)robed assailant.

  
  


The two brothers are the same age, the same height and (to everyone except their parents, who were determined to work at it) share the same features - deep brown eyes, dark blond hair and defined cheekbones with a smattering of freckles now it's summer that, if you're desperate, you can use to tell them apart. Both boys wear silver bands embossed with the word 'IMMUNE' in capitals.

They're engaged in their space duel so deeply, sometimes shouting intergalactic threats, other times giggling so much they can barely keep hold of the swords, certain that they are protecting their city against an invisible threat, but I know something they don't.

I am hiding in this tree on the lawn. And I have a lightsaber.

I leap down from the tree, fiddling with the buttons on the lightsaber until it makes a sudden whoosh-sound and lights up scarlet and launch myself at the small intergalactic defenders, shouting:

  
  


"Be very afraid, Jedi! I come to take your city! Stand ground, if you dare!"

"Aghhh!" They both scream and whirl on me, swords raised, but Tatooine's guard seems to think better of it and starts to run towards the safety of the tree den. His brother, not having any of it, grabs his arm:

'No, Alby, we have to fight!"

Alby looks at my lightsaber, somewhat sceptically, and I raise my eyebrows at him and say:

"Come on, brave Jedi knight. Defend your realm."

He glances at his brother and seems to regain some bravery in the face of the flashing lightsaber, giving me a flash of a smile. "Okay', he says, "But you'll be sorry you ever landed in Tatooine!"

"A-ha! Attack, young Jedi!"

I crash the lightsaber against their swords, spinning to fight both of them at once, throwing a few gambols in for added theatre. They laugh and strike at me with the swords, the intergalactic threats turned on me now.

"You will never defeat me, Jedi knights!" I shout and the bathrobed assailant cries:

  
  


"Haha - but we have a secret weapon! Yoda!" He turns back to the house and the open front door to scream this, but nothing stirs from inside. He shares a confused look with Alby. "Yoda!" They shout together. Nothing.

Eventually, the secret weapon emerges in the form of a three-year old girl with dark brown hair, the eyes of her older brothers and a wounded expression.

"Mama, I don't want to be Yoda." She complains, making her way across the grass to me. "I want to be an Ewok, Arlo!"

The bathrobed Jedi - Arlo - rolls his eyes and sighs dramatically. "Sylvie, this isn't Mama, this is Darth Maul and we need Yoda to protect the city!"

Alby, ever the peacemaker, puts his lips to Sylvie's ear and whisper-yells. "It's almost the same thing, Sylvie."

She doesn't seem to agree, wrinkling her nose and shaking her head. "Ewoks are like teddies. Yoda's green, Alby."

Arlo casts a worried glance at me, concerned that Darth Maul might not leave them much more time for negotiation and just take the city anyway and hisses, "But you need to be fierce."

"I can be a fierce Ewok." Sylvie challenges, getting ready to stare down her older brother, but he gives in, not willing to lose a stare-off.

"Okay. You can be a fierce Ewok, Sylv."

She grins, triumphant, her russet eyes sparkling. It's all looking pretty bleak for Darth Maul as the kids turn their weapons on me, but just then, a gasping shout comes from inside the house.

"Sylvie! Alby! Arlo! Help, help - I'm bein' attacked by a vicious beast!"

  
  


The siblings look at each other, their present battle forgotten, then shout, "Daddy! Daddy!", already running back into the house. I follow them more slowly, and dissolve into laugher at what I find in the living room.

Newt is lying on the carpet with baby Peter balanced on his chest, thrashing as much as he can without Peter sliding off. Peter is shrieking, reaching out to tug on the pockets of Newt's T-shirt - a new game - as Newt yells between gasps of laughter. "Help, help, guys - a vicious beast!"

The twins are already giggling, happy enough to watch the duel between Dad and baby, but Sylvie can't take her father's torture.

"I'll save you, Daddy!" Sylvie dives to the floor and puts her arms around Peter's stomach, pulling him back, and I jump forward but Newt's already averting disaster.

"Gently, Sylvie!" He says, taking Peter back from her arms and folding him into his. "Don't pull him like that, love - thank you, ma'am, you saved my life and I'm forever in your debt."

Peter seems remarkably unbothered by the duel, happily looking around the room and smacking his hands together as Newt straps him back into the baby bouncer on the carpet. "Right." Newt claps his hands and gets to his feet. "Pyjama time, I reckon, lady and gents!"

"But we haven't saved the city yet - Darth Maul was attacking!" Arlo protests, pointing an accusing finger at me. Newt raises an eyebrow at me with a grin.

"Was he?"

I nod and pull Arlo into my arms while he giggles and struggles to escape. "It was a vicious and terrifying battle, wasn't it, young Jedi?"

"Yes, yes!" He shrieks and I ruffle his hair, freeing him.

  
  


"Well," Newt says, tapping a finger against his lips. "Isn't this lucky, guys? I happen to have an agreement with Darth Maul - no attacking my allies. Which means the city is saved - well done, my young friends."

Alby and Sylvie cheer, and Arlo nods, going along with it, even though it isn't a fight to the death.

"Now then," I say, smiling at my band of miscreants. "City saved, who can put their pyjamas on fastest? Race back here, then we can pick a story. Ready, steady...go!"

The kids pelt off towards the stairs, stumbling as they go and almost knocking over Savannah Davenport, who's coming down them with her suitcase. She's stayed with us for the week to do some work experience with Newt at the theatre and is just about to catch the bus to see her friends in the city.

"Whoops, watch out tiger! Does anyone know what time the next bus is?" She calls into the kitchen as she trips over the galoshes on the bottom step. "I didn't look at the clock!"

"Er..." Newt is pulling baby bottles out of the steriliser, so I stop and lean over to the notice board. "7:00 - so about five minutes? Have you got everything?" I ask, my mom instinct kicking in.

Savannah laughs breezily, still trying to force the end of a scarf into the bulging suitcase. "Almost certainly not! I'll text you." She jerks upright suddenly, something remembered. "Ooh, Mom texted me to ask you what days you'd be free to come round for dinner next week?"

"Blimey, I'd totally forgotten about that!" Newt says, "Agh, that'd be lovely, but next week's buggin' chaos, Vannah."

"But when is it anything else?" I smile as Newt slides the plastic bottles across the sideboard to me. He tilts his head to one side, acknowledging the point.

"True, true. Well, we can't do Monday 'cause the twins have that play, right, Lilybird?"

I nod. "Yep. 'Goldilocks and the Three Bears'. Don't worry, we'll work it out for one of the days - gosh, is that your bus, honey?"

A white double decker is crawling down the street, not looking very energetic in the heat of the evening, but the sight has the opposite effect on Savannah, who leaps up and throws her arms around each of us at lightning speed.

"Ooh, yes! Yes - gotta go! Love you both madly, thank you, thank you! Say goodbye to the others for me. Bye, baby!" Savannah leans down to stroke Peter's hair and Newt frowns, catching her hand at the door.

"You sure you don't want us to call a taxi, Vannah? Or I could drive ya'?"

  
  


She grins, already halfway out of the door, signalling at the bus to stop its crawl for a few minutes. "I'm fine, Dad," She teases. "I've caught buses before - I'll text you guys when I get there."

And she is gone, flying down the road after the bus. For a couple of rare seconds, the house seems very still after the mania and the noise of the week that is coming to an end. Everything seems to be winding down as Newt spins back to me and laughs, shaking his head.

"Bloody hell, that girl is gonna get somewhere, even if she has to build her own buggin' rocketship to do it."

A few days after Newt got out of the Rehab Centre back in 2072, we went to see the Davenports - there were a lot of tears that day, from all sides. By now, Savannah and her sister Isla are regulars at our house - film nights, babysitting or family dinners - and it's lovely that the Davenports have given us a hand in watching them grow up. Isla has matured into quietly determined twenty-one year old, studying Animation in Los Angeles and checking in on her sister through video calls and pages of texts, and Vannah - kind, boisterous, wild and talented - has already grown up into a real force of nature, not to be reckoned with.

"I know!" I reply, "She's a firecracker, alright. When she's a world famous superstar we can obviously sell all her Christmas cards and make millions."

I started scooping the baby formula into the plastic bottles as Newt adds fondly:

"You should have seen her at the theatre - nothin' stopped her! Who's that? Oh, so-and-so, the director, and she'd be straight off to talk to 'em." He chuckles, as he pours the water into a plastic jug. "When can we see them, though? Next week is buggin' crazy. Tuesday, I've got that rehearsal to sort and that'll go on all hours, Wednesday - that's the day we're goin' to see Ol and Jax, isn't it, to look at wedding stuff. How about Friday?'

"No, no. Karl's got that promotional thing at work, and I promised I'd be there. Gosh," I sigh. "I'm so proud of her but there's no way I'd want to do that five months pregnant."

Newt shakes his head and says, "Honestly, I don't think Min's all that hot on her doin' it five months pregnant, but he doesn't dare stop her...I don't know, thirty years of laid-back-don't-care attitude vanished with a sonogram."

I laugh. "Which one are you talking about?"

It's certainly true though. Karly and Min haven't exactly had the smoothest relationship ever, doing exactly the same in adulthood as they did when we were teenagers - breaking up over tiny things, seeing other people for a while, making things exceptionally awkward in our shared apartment and then realising that there really was nobody else on the planet that understood them in quite the same way. Karly held my hand through all three of my pregnancies in the last six years, all the time not certain that she could ever do the same thing, because she wasn't sure that Min would ever be serious and knuckle down to their relationship. But, he proposed a couple of summers ago and they got married last year, which was confirmation enough and - as much as we tease them - all of us are ridiculously excited about it.

"Still," I say, glancing up at the photos of us on the walls, including one of me at Halloween about a month before the twins were born. I barely moved all night, because my back hurt and N had sat next to me all night, making me laugh until I forgot about it. "I would not want to do that again."

  
  


"Nope!" Newt grins. "All the discovering nappies and formula and not havin' a clue about absolutely buggin' anything."

I reach across and rub his shoulder, saying. "Hey - we did a pretty good job though." We both look across to the stairs and the trail of shoes and lightsabers leading up to it.

"The best." Newt pushes the jug towards the bottles and moves behind me, wrapping his arms around my waist and leaning his head against the top of mine as I start pouring the water into the containers and swirling them. "You know - minus the kids, 'cause they transcend this stuff - you're my favourite person in the whole world, right? I love you so buggin' much."

I laugh. "I'm sorting sterilised baby bottles!"

"And your point is?"

"That you pick weird moments, buster."

I can hear the smile in Newt's voice as he replies. "No - I was just thinkin' that there is nobody in the whole world I would rather be sterilising baby bottles with."

I shake my head, but I twist around in his arms to kiss him, before turning back to the never-ending bottle task. "I love you too - so much."

As I do so, my gaze catches on the simple gold band on the ring finger of my left hand, the one that N wears an exact copy of. And I look at the white scars, still as thick and raised as they were nine years ago, twisting their way across his hands and up his arms. It has been hard sometimes - in our heads we'd built it up to getting out of the Rehab Centre, but there was a lot that came after that, for all of us. A lot of difficult conversations. A lot of guilt. A trip back to Denver with Will. Multiple times where Newt felt phantom twinges in his head and dropped everything and ran if he was with somebody else and we'd have to call him to find out where he was and go to a Contagion drop-in centre, who would always give us the all clear. Even now, there are nights when I dream myself back there and have to wake up Newt just to see the clarity in his eyes, days when he'll have a flashback so vivid he just has to stop moving until it's over. It's been hard, just like we knew it would be. And it has been worth it a thousand times over.

"Can you imagine if someone had shown us that picture in the Maze?" I ask, pointing to one of the six of us on Sylvie's birthday this year that's hanging on the wall. Charlie took that photo - not long before she had to run off back to the vet school for her exam revision - she lived with us for a long time after the Maze and, even now, came back in the holidays sometimes. The photograph next to it is from our honeymoon, sitting on the steps in Hyde Park in London, both of us laughing in the sunlight. "Or that one?"

I feel Newt nod behind me. "Bloody hell, you'd laugh 'em out of town, wouldn't ya'? It's like a dream sometimes, all this. Like it's too good to even be buggin' possible - how can we be so bloody unlucky and crazy lucky in the same lifetime? Surest way to feel eighteen and eighty at the same time thinkin' 'bout all that."

Newt kisses the top of my head just as a small thud sounds from the stairs and a little voice calls up. "Mama?"

I look down, and Sylvie is standing there in her stripy pyjamas, clutching a book to her chest. "Can we have "Nora the Space Captain?"

Newt has crossed the room and picked up Peter, pulling a clean onesie from the box under the counter and setting him down on the carpet to wriggle him into pyjamas too, as I answer Sylvie.

"Sure thing, honey, you won! Where are the boys?" Arlo is usually the first - and the noisiest - in anything involving a competition and Alby is never far behind him, but Sylvie just smiles up at me.

"They saw a fox in the garden and they're watching it. I seen the fox then I wanted to pick the story so I ran really quietly and they don't know."

A burst of laughter comes from the other side of the living room. "Distraction!" Newt says, as Peter giggles too, kicking his legs. "Clever girl, Sylv."

"A-Team? I call up the stairs. "Are you in pyjamas yet?"

The calls of "Yes, Mama!" and "Coming!" mixed with frantic rustling and shuffling sounds that float down to us from their bedroom tell me that nobody upstairs was in pyjamas. The twins eventually bump down the stairs, all the while chattering about the fox near the bushes, and rush over to the couch to claim their usual spots, giving in happily enough to Sylvie's book choice. I take a warmed baby bottle out from the pan and set it on the coffee table, leaning down to take Peter from Newt's arms. The baby mewls in protest, grizzling and screwing up his face now it's time for food and I stroke his downy hair back from his forehead, kissing him gently.

"Okay," I tell him as I sit down in the armchair and adjust his position in my arms, popping the lid off the bottle with one hand - yes, little victories - and holding it to his lips. "Here you go then, darling."

"Daddy?" Sylvie calls from her position on the sofa. "Can I colour your arms, please? I'll be gentle, promise!"

I smile as Newt gives a long-suffering sigh and fishes the washable markers out of the top drawer, grinning at Sylvie as he sits down in the middle.

"Ah, I guess so, love. As long as you help me wash it off, okay?"

Sylvie nods vigorously, clapping her hands, but I suddenly remember something.

"Oh, N? Watch out for that scar on your shoulder. It was splitting a bit last night."

That is a problem with the Flare scars: they're so thick and so widespread - and being scar tissue, they don't stretch at all - so it's infuriatingly easy to pull the wrong way and split the skin around one even now, if you don't keep the skin hydrated enough. Newt pulls a face and moves the collar of his shirt to one side, craning his neck around to see said scar.

"Ooh, yep, you're right. Bloo- bunny rabbits," He says, catching himself. "I'll remember to put the gel on before bed."

But Sylvie has already scrambled up from the sofa - a favour for a favour. "I'll do it!" and she runs into the bathroom, coming back with the moisturising gel. "Start, Daddy, and I'll put it on you. Aren't you being Space Captain, Mama?"

She shoots me a slightly disappointed look from the couch, but Alby's got my back.

"Mama can't be Space Captain - she's feeding Peter so he sleeps." Alby says calmly. On cue, Peter makes a tiny spluttering sound and I take the bottle out and prop up his head until he opens his mouth again. But then Alby spins round to Newt, a new idea written on his face. "Or we could move to Mama? If we sit on the floor, she can see the book and feed Peter!"

"Good idea, honey," I smile at him and he beams back. "Come and sit by me then."

Alby bounces over and leans against my knees, Newt on my other side with Sylvie in his lap so she can have full access to both his arms and the picture book and Arlo puts his head on the shoulder that Sylvie hasn't wiped the moisturising cream all over. With a final pat, she asks him:

"Better, Daddy?"

"Much better - thank you." Newt kisses her forehead with a smile before twisting around to me. "Right, you ready, Mama? Opening lines!"

Newt holds the book up so I can see it and I start to read:

"It was a pretty wild morning up in Outer Space when Nora the Space Captain looked out of her window..."

And the story goes on smoothly, N filling in all the other characters with various voices and is quickly reprimanded by the kids when he uses the wrong voice. The obvious problem comes when we reach the end of the double page spread - Sylvie is happily colouring in the gaps between Newt's scars as she listens, pinning his arm down.

Newt shifts a little. "I can't turn the pages like that, Sylvie, just let me - good job, you're on it, Arlo."

Arlo soon recognises the problem and pushes the page over and the story continues. As Nora goes on her epic quest through space with her crew, I can't help but look at our children, crowded around us. Our children, who will never know what it feels like to be no more than pawns in a scientific facade, will never be forced to surrender control of their bodies, who will never live in a world where even going outside could kill you. Our children, who - so many times - I wasn't sure would ever be reality, who are beyond everything we'd ever imagined.

It was only in the last five years, when I held the twins in my arms for the first time - so tiny, with their shocks of almost white blond hair, flailing and catching errant strands of my hair in their fists - that I understood what my mother must have felt the day WICKED took me away and why she let me go, what my Dad felt, watching me there, why Sylvia, Newt's mother, kept fighting her husband even though he was so much stronger, even though she could never win. I knew that day that I would do anything to protect them - and that feeling goes beyond reason, beyond instinct, beyond everything.

Arlo has a thumb in his mouth, his eyes following the magic of the brightly-coloured pages and Sylvie is drawing tiny spiders between N's scars, much to his distaste and amusement. Alby is still listening, glancing back at the book every once in a while, but reaching up with one hand to let Peter grab his fingers as I gently sit him up and rub his back in circles until he burps - causing a break in the story for the great hilarity that triggers.

They know some things - they know we've all been together since we were very young, they've seen all the photos from WICKED. They know that Daddy's scars mean he was sick, but also that he was very brave. They know that Alby's name, Arlo's middle name, Winston, and Peter's middle name, Charles, are all for good friends that we lost - good friends who were very brave too. One day they'll learn that not everyone's parents have writing on their necks, not everyone's Daddy has scars that you can colour in between. One day we'll tell them the whole story. But right now, all they need to know is that we love them - they are safe, and this is home.

"And, with the dragon's egg safely delivered, the crew gave a huge cheer-" Everybody whoops on cue, clapping hands. "-and all got back on the ship, to prepare for the next adventure." I finish and Newt closes the book, gently extracting his arm with its newest sleeve tattoo from Sylvie's grasp.

"Right, everybody, hugs for Mama!" Newt cries, jumping to his feet and the kids jump too, deciding some kind of unofficial affection order.

"Gentle hugs because of baby - goodnight, Mama, love you!" Alby says as he wraps his arms around me as lightly as he can and kisses my cheek, patting Peter on the head before jumping back to let Sylvie scramble up my legs to follow his example, hugging my neck as tight as she can, but arching her body to avoid squashing Peter. Arlo opts for a sneak attack, standing on a footstool and hugging me around the back of the armchair and I laugh and stretch one arm behind my head to hug him back.

"Goodnight, goodnight - sleep well, love you!" I cry as N leans over to kiss me.

"For what it counts," he says. "I love you too."

I smile as Arlo shakes his head at Newt, like he's wilfully ignored a crucial part of bedtime protocol. "But you're coming back!" He points out.

Newt chuckles and admits, "Yeah, I am. I'll come back, love."

You always will. He pats my head too and I roll my eyes as he disappears up the stairs after our space captains, his turn to make sure they're in bed.

With the living room quiet, I lean back in the armchair with a sigh, looking out of the window at the far end of the room. It isn't anything like dark yet, but pale pinks and yellows are just starting to ebb into the blue sky outside, lighting up the aeroplane trails from all directions like floating streamers. A hot air balloon from somewhere in the parks is bobbing over the trees not far from the house, the light from its flames blazing every couple of minutes, adding even more colour to the sky.

Peter snuffles softly on my chest, one of my hands resting on his back to keep him there, the other gently brushing his dark brown hair back from his face. His tiny fingertips grasp at my lizard pendant as he sleeps and I feel a rush of love so strong it makes my eyes prickle. I can hear my husband's low voice through the open bedroom door, telling the twins about the fox's den and the man in the moon - my husband, who had been so nervous about being a father, so determined he would never be what his had been - and hear their whispered questions in response, and I can picture them, kneeling up on Arlo's bed, looking out of the circular window at the garden.

WICKED stole homes from hundreds of children - they made sure we never had one in name, only existing in a series of numbered rooms, locked within their schedules, but the funny thing is that they created them too, or allowed us to create them, because homes are people. And this is what life is - it isn't fame or perfection or money or manipulation, it's love. I'm sorry that you have read almost fifteen years of our lives, just to hear 'all you need is love' at the end of it, but that is almost always true - human beings cannot survive without it. Homes are made up of the people you love and, in that case, all of us: Harriet and Sonya, Gally, his new girlfriend Emily, Clint and Dahlia, Olly and Jax, Thomas and Brenda, Jorge, Charlie, Karly and Minho, Newt and I had been, and would be, home - inevitably home - for a long, long time.

**THE END**


End file.
